Intelligent Machines 859: What's Behind the Fox?

Summary

Intelligent Machines 859: What's Behind the Fox?

All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) – February 26, 2026

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Overview

In this lively and wide-ranging episode, host Leo Laporte is joined by Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis to welcome special guest Jeff Atwood—legendary technologist, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, and now, social entrepreneur behind the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative (RGMI). The panel explores Jeff’s unique journey through tech, community building, and his ambitious efforts to change the landscape of rural poverty with targeted guaranteed income. With characteristic humor and philosophy, Atwood reflects on the impacts of AI on online communities, the legacy of his work, and the role of wealth and philanthropy in today’s Gilded Age. The conversation also touches on the current state of AI agents, coding assistants, market disruptions, and a healthy dose of offbeat ‘who’s got the best toys’ banter.

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Key Themes & Discussions

1. Welcoming Back Paris Martineau & Guest Jeff Atwood

• Lighthearted opening: Leo welcomes Paris back post-sickness and introduces Jeff Atwood, calling him a “legendary bundle of energy” and highlighting his background (Stack Overflow, Discourse, Coding Horror blog).
• Atwood’s playful prop comic persona emerges early, showing off retro Legos and coding memorabilia ([03:01]).
• Jeff’s company name “Civilized Discourse Construction Kit” comes from the classic Pinball Construction Set software ([03:00–05:00]).

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2. Philosophy Behind Discourse and Online Communities

Discourse’s Design Philosophy:

• “It’s a construction set for communities that don’t rip themselves apart with drama … because you have standards. Like, look, we’re here to be kind of kind to each other and actually discuss the topics." – Jeff Atwood ([07:28])
• The importance of meaningful engagement and answer quality in knowledge communities.
• AI’s effect on Stack Exchange—how LLMs have led to a reduction in new questions, but maybe filtered out poor quality:

  “You optimize for pearls, not sand. Questions are everywhere and of all types. They’ll never stop.” ([10:53])

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3. The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative (RGMI/I)

Origin Story & Motivation:

• Atwood details his latest social venture: funding guaranteed minimum income for rural, impoverished counties where he grew up. His blog post on the American Dream involved "three months of a nervous breakdown" while he interviewed hundreds of Americans for insights ([13:05–14:09]).

Means-Testing vs Universal Basic Income:

• The project is needs-based, targeted to those eligible in select rural counties.
• Atwood rails against bureaucratic inefficiency and predatory middlemen:

  “All I’m saying is, why don’t we take a fixed amount of money and give it to the people that need it the most? I don’t even know why this would be slightly controversial…” ([15:42])

• The program will give $1500–1600/mo, via random lottery, for 16 months, with an impact study intended to build empirical support for UBI policies ([16:32–18:02]).

Funding & Scale:

• Atwood’s family is currently self-funding with a goal to attract outside donors, targeting “$47M x 18” to reach every rural county ([17:39–18:39]).
• Notable philanthropic partners: Holocaust survivor Giselle Huff, among others ([26:20]).

Core Insight about Poverty:

• Atwood on trust and dignity:

  “These people surviving like this, working four jobs, they know all about survival. They’re tenacious, especially the single mothers…” ([19:22])

• The aim is to demonstrate that reliability and trust, not paternalism, is transformative.

Emotional Context:

• “I’m always crying. My superpower.” – Jeff Atwood ([23:10])

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4. Philanthropy, Wealth & The (Second) Gilded Age

• Atwood ties present-day wealth inequality to the original railroad barons, asking:

  “What is money even for? How do I spend it all? I just want a simple life, man.” ([30:47], [30:51])

• The parallels between the historical Gilded Age and modern tech-driven inequality, referencing Carnegie and the importance of investing in change ([42:09]).

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5. The AI Era: Stack Overflow, Coding, & Automation

AI’s Relationship to Stack Overflow:

• "In some ways, AI wouldn’t exist without Stack Exchange, and in other ways, AI decimated Stack Exchange." – Leo ([10:14])
• Atwood: “I resent it if it hollows out the community. But… there’s always new languages, new situations... The goal is to make it easier for people to be better programmers.” ([32:05])

LLMs as Summarizers:

• Atwood intriguingly calls LLMs “JPEG for words,” adept at summarization yet fundamentally shallow on real understanding ([33:13]).
• Recent “Nobody should learn to code” controversy contextualized:

  “Because coding isn’t the goal. Solving the problem for the user is. That may or may not involve code...” ([37:14])

On AI for Research/Assistants:

• “I vibe research, like a madman...It’s like having a research assistant. I still double-check its work…” ([36:19])

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6. Tech Nostalgia, Props, and Playful Banter

• Atwood delights in showing off off-brand retro Lego computers, original Apple manuals, and pinball memorabilia ([03:18–06:02]).
• The story behind the “fox painting” in his background:

  “I’m the fox, Betsy’s the crow… I talked her into the cheese, but I wanted her to sing. That’s why she got to. I would love to always get more cheese.” ([37:46])

• The “Leisure Suit Larry” JPEG behind the fox picture revealed—a literal easter egg for fans ([38:28] through [40:00]).

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7. Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Human Connection:

  “You have Andy Herzfeld’s energy.” – Leo ([02:40])

• On Community:

  “Attack the topic…is your answer adding something to the conversation…?” – Jeff ([07:28])

• On Stack Overflow’s impact:

  “Stack Overflow has added billions of dollars to world productivity. And I read that in Carl Sagan’s voice: 'Billions and billions.’” – Jeff ([06:03])

• On UBI critics:

  “These people cannot manage their money—[they’ll] spend it on drugs and booze… just a basic lack of…these people are scrappier than any of us.” ([18:53–19:08])

• On “Pearls Over Sand”:

  “You optimize for pearls, not sand. Questions are everywhere and of all types. They’ll never stop.” ([10:53])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Guest Welcome: | [00:00–04:35]
• Old-School Props & Discourse Origin: | [04:35–06:30]
• Community Philosophy: | [07:28–08:13]
• Polarization & Social Fragmentation: | [08:13–10:14]
• Stack Overflow vs. AI, Question Quality: | [10:30–12:24]
• RGMI Details & Motivation: | [12:38–15:42]
• Means Testing & Controversy: | [15:42–17:39]
• UBI Implementation Details: | [17:39–21:15]
• Personal Ties & Emotions: | [21:22–23:10]
• Philanthropy & Wealth Reflection: | [30:47–31:08], [42:09–43:29]
• AI on Stack Overflow’s Future: | [32:05–33:13]
• AI Assistants & Research Use: | [36:16–37:39]
• Pearls over Sand Philosophy: | [10:53], [71:44]

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Noteworthy Sidebars & Humor

• Paris describes the Jeff-Jeff-Leo “wavelength”:

  “It’s like a dark, fractile Leo is how I would describe you… There’s like a wavelength that is matching up here.” ([09:13])

• Atwood’s emotional, earnest asides:
  “I’m always crying. My superpower. I have to take breaks and crying. Crap. Done.” ([23:10])

• What’s behind the fox?
  The segment where Jeff reveals he’s hiding a Leisure Suit Larry JPEG behind the fox picture in his office ([38:28]).

• Joy vs Pain in Parenthood:

  “49% incredible pain in the ass. 51% the most sublime joy you’ve ever felt. And it’s the 1% that makes all the difference.” ([35:36])

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Closing Thoughts

• Atwood remains committed to social innovation, reflecting on technology’s role in society:

  “What is money even for? I just want a simple life, man...If you have everything you need, then help others have everything.” ([30:47], [30:58], [30:25])

• On the future of community and technology: Atwood sees hope in building supportive, trust-forward networks and leveraging AI to empower, not alienate humans.

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Useful Links & Further Reading

• Jeff Atwood's Blog: blog.codinghorror.com (see “The Road Not Taken” on Guaranteed Minimum Income)
• RGMI: rgmii.org / shortcut: StayGold.us
• Discourse
• Stack Overflow

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For Listeners:

This episode brims with big-picture thinking about software, society, and charity from a founding father of the tech Q&A space. Atwood’s mix of emotional honesty, technical insight, and energetic show-and-tell creates a memorable, inspiring session—useful for engineers, social innovators, and anyone who believes tech can (and should) serve humanity.

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Summary by podcast.ai — maintaining the episode's original tone & sense of fun. For comments or feedback, join the TWiT Community.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff and Parris are here. Yay. Parris is back and we have an amazing guest. Jeff Atwood is the creator of Stack Exchange. He created Discourse, the forum software use, and now he wants to give universal income to people in poor counties around the country. What does Jeff Atwood think about everything? Coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 859 recorded Wednesday, February 25, 2026 what's behind the Fox? It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover AI, robotics and all the smart little doodads surrounding us in every part of our lives. It is time for me to welcome back to our microphones the person we missed the most last week, Paris Martineau. How are you feeling? You feeling well?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm feeling great.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm snowed in.

[Paris Martineau]

Relatively healthy. I'm snowed in. But my stress levels are rising because this pre show has been a whirlwind. That's why you need to get in Club Twit, because you need to see what just happened here.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't wait to get to our club. Twitter.

[Jeff Atwood]

Don't invite me on understand what you're asking for. I mean, I'm with a giant punch in Joel's ass, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let me introduce my other partner in crime here, Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism emeritus at the City University of New York with his.

[Jeff Atwood]

All right, Daredevil.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he is Daredevil.

[Jeff Atwood]

Journalisms are. I mean journalism, the law, that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

He was. Yes, that's right. He is now at an adjunct something or other at Montclair State University in beautiful New Jersey and SUNY Stony Brook in beautiful New York.

[Jeff Atwood]

I haven't got away with massive new respect for lawyers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he's a professor.

[Jeff Atwood]

And starting.

[Leo Laporte]

Our guest, ladies and gentlemen, is a bundle of energy and I am thrilled to get him on the wonderful legendary Jeff Atwood, blogger. His famous blog, Coding Horror is one of the very best coding blogs out there. Founder of Stack Overflow. That should tell you something. And he's the founder also of Discourse, which is the forum software we've been using for about 10 years and adore. It's the best and it's great to welcome you, Jeff Atwood, to Intelligent Machines.

[Jeff Atwood]

Thank you. And what took you so long to invite me?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. I've had your partner on before. Joel Spolski.

[Jeff Atwood]

What we should get you invite me on like I'm inviting him on.

[Leo Laporte]

Shocking. You know, you remind me a little of Andy Herzfeld. You have the. You have Andy Herzfeld's energy.

[Jeff Atwood]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know Andy?

[Jeff Atwood]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that a compliment or an insult?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, it's an absolute compliment. He was, of course, one of the legendary creators of the Macintosh back in the.

[Jeff Atwood]

You know, who I do know is Bill Budge pinball instruction set. I got it up here if you

[Leo Laporte]

want to see it. No kidding.

[Jeff Atwood]

The name of our company is Civilized Discourse Construction kit comes from Bill Fired. But the construction set series and. Can I be a prop comic and grab things?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, get some props. Everybody's looking at your props. Might as well get them.

[Jeff Atwood]

Look at all this off brand computer things. This thing's playing Minesweeper and it has a seat. It's a off brand Lego, like a desktop PC.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like a Game Boy. What is that down there?

[Jeff Atwood]

This is like a model of those computers old people used to use that kids build for fun. It has Minesweeper. It's Windows like 95.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a PC Junior in a.

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no. It's a classic beige PC.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my.

[Jeff Atwood]

Made out of off brand Lego. And then I'll show you this one. This is more of a gaming rig. They don't sell this one anymore. But look how sweet this rig would be. Look at this video car gp it's got it all.

[Leo Laporte]

What the hell is it made out of Lego too?

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, it's an off brand pan to see. It's like, let's just make up letters. That's her name. I mean, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You will. You will lose your pants when you play our games on the pantasy.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, it says pan, but I can provide it through show notes. That one is really fun. I send it to a friend I'm working with on rgmi, who is also one of the early people at Stack Overflow. And we're just having the time of our lives, like revisiting this fun we had building Stack Overflow. Because when you work with me, it's like mandatory fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I think so why bother? So here I am. I've been using Discourse as our forums at Twitter community for years. It's the Discourse construction set or something like that. I had no idea it was based on the pinball construction set that Bill Pudge created. Oh, no. I've sent him off on another tangent lately.

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no, I got it all. And I want to show you some more because these are.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank goodness he's on a wireless Headset. He can get around.

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh, by the way, Bill Budge still has this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This.

[Jeff Atwood]

This glove and this. You're going to crack up. Bill is such a sweetheart. And he works so hard on the JavaScript engine at Chrome.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know he did the JavaScript engine at Chrome. Wow.

[Jeff Atwood]

And he said to me, jeff, you've changed my life. And I'm like, you were my idol. I was playing your games. It's also funny. He doesn't actually like video games. He just likes building construction.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a coder.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

He's very pure. He's a wonderful man. He still lives at the same house. If you get that old software, that's his home address.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Jeff Atwood]

He lives there. Wow. He's so grounded. I love him.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple to Apple ii.

[Jeff Atwood]

What an honor.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there it is. Oh, Pinball.

[Jeff Atwood]

That I look well. I have a pinball.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the best. That was. He did Raster Blaster, too. Which.

[Jeff Atwood]

There's a local place in Alameda that has a good pinball place you want to go.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got a little ball in a box trapped. So it will never live its full life because you've trapped it in that plastic box.

[Jeff Atwood]

And check it out. Look who's a big fan of coding Horror. Bill Freaking bunch. One of the best coders.

[Leo Laporte]

That is pretty cool.

[Jeff Atwood]

And that thing Carmack said about me was, I think stack overflow has added billions of dollars to the world productivity. And I read that in Carl Sagan's voice. Billions and billions.

[Leo Laporte]

Billions of dollars.

[Jeff Atwood]

I was like, so stunned. It was an incredible compliment to live up to. There's a few others that were in the series and it was like, we'll make them rock stars. Racing destruction set. Not as good as the other one.

[Leo Laporte]

If you make a destruction kit, you should make a destruction set, I think. Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

There was one. Racing destruction set.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I saw it.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Adventure construction set.

[Jeff Atwood]

That one's fun. I remember.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't remember these.

[Jeff Atwood]

Making some. And just for no particular reason. Love Archon.

[Leo Laporte]

Archon. He did Archon. That was a.

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no. This is Electronic Arts. It's like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's ea.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was on the Atari. I had it on the Atari. I loved Archon. The pieces would come alive and they. It was kind of a chess like game. Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

Here's sort of the game as it looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was really.

[Jeff Atwood]

You would enter chess pieces and fight. It was like, what is that game with a knight figure chess where they animate the characters.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was kind of like Star Wars.

[Jeff Atwood]

That was kind of Boring. It's just Star Trek. This is the Commodore 64 version. What is it anyway? Different set of artists.

[Leo Laporte]

And then we need a new archon. Maybe Jeff, you do you cod at all still music instructions that I'm using

[Jeff Atwood]

very high language, very high level language called English. We're using it right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the best coding language.

[Jeff Atwood]

That is how I change the world.

[Leo Laporte]

It is very high level, those words.

[Jeff Atwood]

And also recruiting amazing people and unleashing them. So anyway, this was nice. I had it like a synthesizer to do this Apple iic. But that's the philosophy is like it's a construction set for communities that don't rip themselves apart with drama and like the howling of wolves. And it just doesn't degenerate because you have standards. Like, look, you know, we're here to be kind of kind to each other and actually discuss the topics. And you know, if you're going to attack something, tack the topic and just. Is your answer adding something conversation or you're just like, I'm so mad now. Someone is wrong on the Internet. And that happens.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just. It's not just the Internet has become the world, hasn't it, of this polarized anger.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, I had people lecturing a mess on. It's not polarized. I'm like, are you serious? But yes, the polarization. Because first of all, we have a two party system. The worst form of democracy.

[Leo Laporte]

It does kind of lend itself to polarization coalitions. Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

And we can't amend the Constitution. Explain how if you think that can happen, all the scholars like, no, it comes down to interpretation. And guess who's in charge of interpretation? Sad trombone sound. You know who it is?

[Leo Laporte]

Congress.

[Jeff Atwood]

World's worst couples counselor, John Roberts.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me get to. Because we only have half an hour with the wonderful Jeff Atwood and there's so many things I want to ask you.

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no. You got more. You want more. Well, you want some of this?

[Leo Laporte]

We, we. Jeff Jarvis, can only say I love

[Jeff Atwood]

your reaction to all this. Like, what am I looking at? What is this person? You know, I get this a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Jeff Atwood]

They're like, I've never met anyone like you, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I'm just. I'm intrigued by you and Leo bouncing off each other is. It's like, it's like a dark, fractile Leo is how I would describe you. Not that you're dark in nature or tone. No, it's just you guys. I'm trying to understand the prism on which you guys exist because there's Like a wavelength that is matching up here.

[Jeff Atwood]

I think they're quarks, other human beings. And he's got a heart. I can see it in him. No, it's not as good as mine, but it's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm actually kind of a misanthrope, believe it or not. I don't, but I do. You know what I care about human beings. In abstract, it's the individuals I'm not crazy about. But in abstract, I think humans are pretty great. Pretty amazing, the things we've done. So by the way, I was misinformed. It was the Supreme Court is who you were talking about, not Congress.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, they're in charge of interpreting.

[Leo Laporte]

They're in charge of interpretation. Congress makes the law. Supreme Court breaks the law. No, that's wrong.

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm. You know, we'll see. I think that could be. Anyway, enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff. Jeff. So to make this about AI, we will talk about Stack Exchange in a little bit. Because in. In some ways, AI wouldn't exist without Stack Exchange. And in other ways, AI decimated Stack Exchange. Fortunately, you had already sold it before. Before it decimated.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, defined decimal.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think a drop.

[Jeff Atwood]

I don't think the correct statistics is being used.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. That the monthly question volume on stack exchange dropped 78% since chat GPT.

[Jeff Atwood]

Do you know how many of his questions probably sucked? Most of them. So what I'm saying is.

[Leo Laporte]

So no loss is what you're saying. It was no loss.

[Jeff Atwood]

You optimize for pearls, not sand. Questions are everywhere and of all types. They'll never stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Every pearl starts with a grain of sand. But not every sand grain becomes a pearl.

[Jeff Atwood]

But what's the point of question that nobody. It's so silly. It's the answerers that are doing the real work. And I don't mind this. My Joel always was not a fan of this. Was like they don't understand the relationship. It's like, we want to help you. If you're willing to do the work, to help yourself, you have to ask the right question. Rubber Duck question. Asking where? Before you ask. Here, work, whatever. Okay, ask your question of this rubber duck over here.

[Leo Laporte]

People do that with debugging, don't they? Rubber Duck debugging.

[Jeff Atwood]

Okay, so ask your question of this phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hold on.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, folks, he's got the original. It looks like. I can't believe it. Oh, it's got a smartphone in it.

[Jeff Atwood]

This thing is really nice. You can even take the back off. This is so much for a completely impractical, ridiculous thing. This is surprisingly Practical.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to get one because you could carry it around on the street. People would think you're on one of those old Motorola. The original cell phones.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, it's full, usable. You can't get the buttons, but you know, that, you know, scrolling stuff works.

[Leo Laporte]

That is hysterical.

[Jeff Atwood]

Now shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

You got a lot of toys, Jeff. You got the best toys.

[Jeff Atwood]

Mom, it's not a good time. I'm on this really important show with Leo Kitten. All right, hold on.

[Leo Laporte]

Final.

[Jeff Atwood]

Mom was like that. I'm an only child. You know what is.

[Leo Laporte]

So we do want to talk about Stack Exchange, and we want to talk about your second startup, which is Discourse, which I love, but let's talk about this third startup to begin. We'll begin at the end because you said this is your third and last startup.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, the thing is, I kind of retired from Discourse, but I lied to myself about what it was.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Parris, her website features a profile picture of her holding that phone. Can you show that, Benito? Oh, I can't share my screen. We can't.

[Paris Martineau]

We don't have the technology because we've had to figure out something pre show. But no, it exists.

[Jeff Atwood]

I can share my screen.

[Paris Martineau]

Continue about Discourse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So no, after Discourse, you decided to do the rgmii. Is that the right.

[Jeff Atwood]

The aspirational shortcut is stay gold. You, us, all. One word that will redirect you. But the way that gold us. Let me explain the process here. So things happen, and I'm like, I don't understand what's happening. And I'm like, I got to come to terms with this and figure out a way forward. I don't want. I need something to do. I need a mission. I can't just roll over and take it. And no one should. I was like, what do you do? It's such a complicated problem. And the more I thought about it, the more I laid it out. And the blog post is, that took. That was three months of a nervous breakdown. I'm not lying. I'm not even really telling you some of the stuff that happened during the night. If you scroll to the bottom, there's a Behind the Music where I did talk a little bit about the process, but it was excruciating because I went to hundreds of Americans and asked them, what does the American dream me to you? And that's that entire post.

[Leo Laporte]

You grew up in rural Virginia, correct?

[Jeff Atwood]

Chesterfield county and then University of Virginia.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have a certain, like, Alexis

[Jeff Atwood]

Ohanian who won't even talk to me, but go ahead.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're.

[Leo Laporte]

We're way beneath him at this point.

[Jeff Atwood]

But he did marry well. I'm very impressed.

[Leo Laporte]

Married very well.

[Jeff Atwood]

No complaint. I got Dr. Betsy. She's awesome. But, like, I mean, come on, let's be real.

[Leo Laporte]

So the rural. It's the rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative. When Wesley Faulkner told me about it on Twitter a few weeks ago, I said, is this universal basic income? Is this ubi?

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, that's a good point. We're working on a fact that covered sort of the. When we posted this on Reddit, there was a fairly robust discussion, hacker news. And I want to make sure someone had some. They had good questions, but, like, misconceptions about, like, how it works and what it is. And universal is universal. You're giving everybody X, which for health care, great. If you're alive and a human being, you should get health care. That's the mean test. They call it mean testing. And I get it. For health care, you shouldn't do this. But we're not at the health care level. We're saying, okay, money. In economics, four out of five economists agree. If you're dead, money and economics is irrelevant. So healthcare is the base and the food banks. You know that with Carmack and my partner volatile, and we donated a bunch of money, and it's just means testing. Simply means. And I got this from Reddit. People are so angry about, like, means testing.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jeff Atwood]

It's just basic eligibility, but as I drilled into it, it's like they're right, but they're not right. And this will be in the fact. What happens is these middlemen companies come in and create these incredibly byzantine, complex processes to validate this and charge the government exorbitant amounts to do it. Because the more complex it is, the more money they make, you know, and it's. That's what they're mad at. All I'm saying is, why don't we take a fixed amount of money and give it to the people that need it the most? I don't even know why this would be slightly controversial, but they're saying, that's impossible. You can't do that efficiently. And I'm like, really? Because give me a shot at it. I think we can do it.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're proposing to give. It's not a lot of money. What is it? $1,600 a month?

[Paris Martineau]

That's a lot of money for a lot of.

[Jeff Atwood]

You understand which counties we're in, right? Yeah. In New York City, that's nothing. They'll get a hot dog, right? But in these places we're working, it's the rural areas where by the way, a lot of political power here. And rather than be angry at them for their things, why don't we try to help them and show them the generosity they deserve, that like anyone cares about them. Because what they're saying is year after year, nobody does anything to help us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How much money do you need, Jeff?

[Jeff Atwood]

Me personally?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, how much money does the whole project need?

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, on the RGY website, it's one of the few websites where you go to the buy the product page, there's four tiers free $1 million, $3 million and $15 million.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How much do you need in total?

[Leo Laporte]

How much do you get your I'll

[Jeff Atwood]

effort for the three that we did, It's a chicken and egg problem. We're like, look, go, go, go. I got my mom's county and my dad's county, both of those counties. If you sorted the counties in West Virginia and North Carolina by poverty, they're exactly in the middle. You couldn't have made it more perfect. And that's kind of where you have

[Leo Laporte]

to come in because so you' three counties.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's already started, man.

[Leo Laporte]

$50 million. The participating families, again, they have to qualify, will receive $1,500 a month, but not forever.

[Jeff Atwood]

And it is a random lottery because there's more people that want in. But that helps the science. The goal is to like, look and

[Leo Laporte]

you're going to study the study. The impact over the 16 months. Is that the idea?

[Jeff Atwood]

And show that this works.

[Leo Laporte]

And you don't. You don't say. You have to.

[Jeff Atwood]

By the way, all the data says that it works. It's like, why aren't we doing it right? Good question. And I would love to reach every 50 state because every state is unique, every county is unique. And help a rural county in that state.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have an estimate if you did want to help all the rural counties in the United States, how much that would cost?

[Jeff Atwood]

I am not a math person. It's 47 times 18. So we need 15 for the study and then 3 million for the research so we can continue to build this global repository. It's ubidata.org for everyone to say, see, look.

[Leo Laporte]

Just to get the data to show that.

[Jeff Atwood]

That you tell us if it works.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Spoiler. And then if it does make a difference, which I think we all kind of get that it would. And all the, you know, all the other UBI studies have shown that you guys do.

[Jeff Atwood]

I've had things set to make. These people cannot manage their money.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll spend it on drugs and booze and. And.

[Jeff Atwood]

And what streaming is. This was one of the religious people. Yeah, that really bothered me.

[Leo Laporte]

That is too bad.

[Jeff Atwood]

Just a basic lack of. These people are scrappier than any of us before you.

[Leo Laporte]

We began, you were talking about trust, that the best way to do this is to put some trust in the people you're giving the money to. You don't tell them what to spend it on.

[Jeff Atwood]

These people surviving like this, working four jobs, they know all about survival. They're tenacious, especially the single mothers. Like I get running maternal programs like RX Kids is amazing. You know, Aisha Nyandoro and Jaxson has done the longest running GMI program in the United States for black mothers. And she had incredible insight for us. One thing Betsy and I were worried about is like, look, you're giving people reliable, consistent income for a series of months. Wonderful. But what happens when you put. Pull it away? Is it like Lucy pulling the ball from Charlie Brown? And we were so worried, especially about saying. I was like, alicia, tell us how it works. She said, jeff, these women plan for this. You've given them a timeline. You've given a monthly feeling to be safe, insecure. You don't have to sleep on the street. You can actually feed yourself. And now you have time to think about education, you know, fixing your busing car, whatever you need to get to the next level. You think people want to be stuck in poverty? Really?

[Leo Laporte]

You think that would really be. That would really be the best outcome? Wouldn't it be to help people out?

[Jeff Atwood]

Any of my experience, like I talk to Lyft drivers. They're working so hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Or jobs.

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm sitting on my ass because math making $77,000 a day. And the markets are really up, by the way. Yay. I have more money to give now.

[Paris Martineau]

Is. Is the $50 million funding this coming from your family?

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, me and the family and every family member sat here and read that post with me and the other one that went out, I was like, this is about you two. We're doing this together or not at all.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice.

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm not doing this divorced white guy. I love Betsy and I could have not anything. I couldn't have said her.

[Leo Laporte]

These are the. And these are. This is the people you come from. And this is your family, which I think is. Is really awesome.

[Jeff Atwood]

And I was with my dad in Mercer and just. He was like a little kid. And my mom. My mom drives me crazy. She's like me. It's like, to me, there's too much. And I'm like, mom. She was like a little girl finding the place where her grandmother was. And she was ostracized from her family for the crime of wanting a better life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

She said to me, quote, I didn't want to live in squalor. And that made her too uppity for her family.

[Leo Laporte]

If people want to know more about this attended her graduation, go to blog.codinghorror.com Jeff's written a number of posts. The road not taken is guaranteed. Minimum income is probably the place to start, I would say.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, that's a good place to start. And the actual blog entry that's latest is like, we're launching the initiative. It's a funny blog post because unlike Paul Ford.

[Benito]

Sorry, Paul.

[Jeff Atwood]

You got to have a lot of cautions in the beginning. It's like, I don't even want you to go to the website until I've answered, like, a fair number of questions. And even some people will comment. It's like they didn't read anything, you know? So, like, I tried to bring people in that are willing to actually look at it, you know, and see what it is. I don't want knee jerk, this doesn't work responses, you know, because you do get that. And it's like, this doesn't work.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm like your partner Betsy. Your partner Betsy's quote, kind of says it scientist. Well, we have everything we need. That's how I've always phrased it to our children. That I think extends to our philanthropy. We have everything we need. How do we make sure everybody we

[Jeff Atwood]

have everything we need? I'm a prop comics right here. Hold on, Leo. You're breaking my heart, man. I can't believe.

[Leo Laporte]

Did I make him cry?

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm always crying. My superpower. I have to, like, take breaks and crying. Crap. Done.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Jeff Atwood]

They're still bothering me. Okay, so check it out, Leo. In fact, anyone who wants this, I will give you one. Betsy had these made.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Jeff Atwood]

And it's a local.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a needle point that says we have printed.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's a letter.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Oh, it's letterpress. Yeah. I see in the blog. I see the high five.

[Jeff Atwood]

Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he knows his letterpress for the wind.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, I've been meeting some really nice Jeffs.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, Jeff's Jeffs are good people.

[Jeff Atwood]

Anyone who wants these, you got one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's nice. So how has been. What has the response been? I Mean, obviously you're looking for people who are wealthy to pitch in.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the response problem?

[Jeff Atwood]

We created other rich people and actually show people that we care. It's not even that much money. 47 times 18, whatever that is. Math people do it. I'm literally wrong. Calc, don't leave this. Oh, by the way, I love how they made Word Pets, Word Notepad. So much worse on Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, how do you use Windows? I don't understand how Jeff Apple is using Windows. Look, look, Leo, I like suffering 252. Yeah, you like to suffer.

[Jeff Atwood]

But honestly, like, I play a lot of video games and like, good luck playing video games on whatever the hell it is you're running. Man. Apple Silicon is so elite. My dream machine, chromebook running Apple SoCs.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you just spoke to Jeff right there.

[Jeff Atwood]

Jeff, you and I should get married. I'm endorsing my Jimmy buddy.

[Leo Laporte]

Nvidia did announce you don't have to do PCs with MediaTek. And MediaTek makes an excellent Chromebook. I wouldn't be surprised to see actually some Apple Silicon level Chromebooks.

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm very skeptical. MediaTek is making good SSD. You're gonna have to.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's hard to. It's hard to believe. I bought my daughter one. It's kind of a mind blower. And they're partnering with their fan video.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The best part.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, just as long as. Not Qualcomm. I gotta tell you, it's not Qualcomm. I'm so angry at Qualcomm because when we started this course, one of my main bets was, look, JavaScript's gonna be as faster as faster faster on phones as it will be on desktops. And it got even faster. Like Apple stuff was like faster than their laptops on the phone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

And meanwhile Qualcomm is like, hey, how about a 10% improvement? How about like 12%?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think that's why Jensen has decided that he wants to work with Mediatek. I think they want to show.

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh, they need some help. So hopefully you can Qualcomm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

We're just at like Oregon State and they have a, an exhibit for him with a GTX 4090. It's like Jensen, he went here and I like Jensen, he's cool. And right next to it is a lady who founded Panda Express. So you got a video card and Panda Express. Look at this products we made. Look at this incredible stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

So Jensen would be a good, somebody who would be good to get to kick in a little bit have you been hearing from these people to say, yeah, I want to help?

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no. But again, I'm not really trying. And there are some matches.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Jeff Atwood]

Actually, one of the biggest is this Holocaust survivor Giselle Huff. Have you heard of her?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Jeff Atwood]

Let me prop comic books right here. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, sorry. We love the props. We are an audio as well as video podcast, though. So I have to describe the props. And my God, if you haven't download the video. If you just want to see the backdrop in Jeff's office.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say this is going to be a video.

[Jeff Atwood]

If you like insanity, watch the video.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's pretty tidy. Did you clean it up just for us?

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no, it's always. It's clean. Of course I didn't do, you know, prep. I'm naturally scared. Giselle, force of nature for no money, it's not profit. This woman, Holocaust survivor, and one of the sad things that happened to her, her husband died at like 56 of pancreatic cancer. Her son, Gerald Huff, who was a primary engineer at Google until 2015, also died of pancreatic cancer. The book is titled Force of Nature. And I love this woman. I like strong woman. She said, I've kind of been a libertarian. I said, well, I hope you grew out of that. And Michael Tubbs, candidate for lieutenant Governor's. And his eyes were like this. He's like, you're saying this to this woman. It's like. But she did. She's like, yeah, no libertarians, just stupid. Her son wrote I had that book with sent to room all about he's super worried about jobs being, you know, eradicated by a lot of these things. And she's adopted that mindset. She's like, all in on ubi. She views it as a bridge. Not something that I say, this needs to be kind of the permanent safety net we never had. But, you know, we're in agreement that we need to do more with it.

[Leo Laporte]

And I can't wait to see massive already dislocation. I just heard from one of our club members. Joe is a good friend who's been out of work for three months. He says the job market is murder. It's harder and harder to find work, especially if you're in a technical profession. But that's going to spread with the spread of AI Prompt Engineer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that lasted about three weeks.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's not entirely untrue, though, because if you structure the question right with Tet and never use anything about Pro Mode, everything is horrible. It's so sycophantic and just weak and superficial. Pro is a lot better. You know, it does work. It's like, it's an effective system.

[Leo Laporte]

It's what I've. What I've learned using Claude code extensively, as Paris and Jeff will tell you, is it is all about the interaction. It's all about the dialogue. It's almost a Socratic dialogue between you

[Jeff Atwood]

and the machine, which is the opposite of like, I was so worried for a while the video would just run the table. And this course is about a few things. JavaScript being very powerful for all mobile phones and, you know, the idea that words and paragraphs will still matter. And when I saw just video running the table, I got an existential crisis.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

You know, because like, I love words, I love paragraphs. Videos are great and all and most videos have text super posed anyway. Right. And it's like, if you want to change the world, if you want to improve your career, it's not going to be a TikTok video. Those are cool and all, but like, can you communicate? Can you tell me what the hell it is you're doing and can you make me believe in it that you care about it this much and it's something that you love and get people excited about it?

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking to Jeff Atwood. He is the founder of Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky, creator of Discourse, which is the forum software we use and love and recommend. And his latest is the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income initiative, which I think is a really important program. You'll find it at rgmii.org and you

[Jeff Atwood]

can also use StayGold US as a friendly shortcut. StayGold US Stay Gold, as in don't lose your youthful enthusiasm.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we want to stay gold.

[Paris Martineau]

Stay gold, Pony boy.

[Jeff Atwood]

We do a really good job of beating it out of people.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

And I want you to a not happening to you. And don't let other people.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in a way it's a shame

[Jeff Atwood]

because people take your joy from you. Don't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

We have in the last year kind of stepped back from, away from our global initiatives in the United States. And I think we do have a responsibility. I think your partner is absolutely right. If you have everything you need, then help others have everything.

[Jeff Atwood]

What is money even for? I don't even have.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What is it for otherwise?

[Jeff Atwood]

How do I spend it all? Yeah, I don't have. I just want a simple life, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Dana Carvey once said, getting rich just means you have a bigger bedroom to watch tv.

[Jeff Atwood]

I love this Screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

My son and I watched Fury Road and HDR and it was like I had waited 10 years. I was like, I want to see this myself.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have to tell Paris about that. We convinced Big Screen.

[Jeff Atwood]

This movie has great stuff about women, female empowerment. It's very. And I want to see Furiosa next. But it was better than I expected.

[Leo Laporte]

Furiosa was actually kind of interesting.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, it was a great story.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

And hcr. No compression artifacts, baby. Like off a disc.

[Leo Laporte]

She just made me buy the All4 Matrix.

[Paris Martineau]

I was going to say having All4 Matrix on UHD is really delightful.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's pretty clear that, you know, all the AIs that are out there right now are trained on just pretty much everything they get their hands on, including most of the Internet, Wikipedia, most of the books pirated. But I have to think the Stack Exchange was probably one of the best places for AIs to start when it comes to coding. Do you resent that?

[Jeff Atwood]

Not really. I resent it if it hollows out the community. But my feeling is there's always new languages, new situations. Now granted for Java, there's always new releases of Java, new things, and the end result is to help people. We always said the best outcome on Stack Overflow. You have a question, you type it into Google and you see the answer immediately from Stack Overflow. It's a top voted answer. Now you can drill in and see some other good answers. But the goal is to make it easier for people to be better programmers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Jeff Atwood]

So I don't. I would be glib and say, I don't care. I want it to be sustainable. Like almost like a workers cooperative would be kind of my take at this point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I want to go back to the question Leo asked at the beginning about too much code. Riff on that.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, have you seen some of the stuff that LLMs will do when you tell them to optimize? It's like optimize this for 95%. It's like, okay, return true.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good optimization because it doesn't

[Jeff Atwood]

know what it's doing. It has no actual understanding. It's playing a game of global Blaine statistics and copy paste. And it's good at merging. I call it JPEG for words, which it is. And there's so much stuff. It's like reading summaries. And it is very accurate with summaries. We saw this on Discourse. They implemented it. I was very skeptical and I went to some very complex discussions we had on our internal discourse and Read the summary and was like, that is a very good summary. And it captured the key points in the discussion. It could have captured more, but it got nothing wrong. And it basically was JPEG for that conversation, wasn't it? Without much loss. Does JPEG work on every image? No. Garfield is a bad choice for. You know,

[Leo Laporte]

you sold Stack Overflow, so you're not. You. You know, you. You're at a distance now from it. Although it sounds like you still have a certain emotional investment in it.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, look, men can't have babies. And I love my family. My God.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, you have children. It's like you think you know what love is, and you look up at the sky, those whole galaxies, that's love, and regular love seem quaint and like, it's overpowering. I have a blog post, if you want to get teared up. Read the blog post titled On Fatherhood.

[Leo Laporte]

Say it again. On children.

[Jeff Atwood]

Let me. On parenthood. Sorry, Parenthood.

[Leo Laporte]

Parenthood.

[Jeff Atwood]

Not. I'm not singling me out, but it's just describing that feeling of, this is kind of our purpose to create better human beings.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Atwood]

Software is great and all, but, like, that's the job, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Atwood]

And we get so many compliments, our kids, so many. And I don't tell them anything to do. I don't make them do any computer crap. I want them to find their own things they like, and they definitely see how crazy I am. So it's actually odd. It's like. It's almost like the kids are like, whoa, we don't want to be that crazy as Jeff.

[Leo Laporte]

That pie chart is exactly right on.

[Jeff Atwood]

I changed the colors. Our historian, Sanders, like, you got red blue hair. I was like, oh, God, no, it's not red blue hair.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be funny if joy was gray aqua.

[Jeff Atwood]

I just thought it was funny.

[Leo Laporte]

49 incredible pain in the ass. 51. The most sublime joy you've ever felt. And it's the 1% that makes all the difference. And technically, that's 2%.

[Jeff Atwood]

Anyone? You know, I'm just telling you, you

[Leo Laporte]

aren't good at math, are you?

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, hey, man, you know, I'm a programmer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's why Texas Instruments invented calculators.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. Jeff, I wish we had more time with you. I really. It's such a pleasure. We're going to get you back. And would you like to. Yeah, that's all. You're done. We're done. I know. There's so much more to abandoning me, man. You know, I don't want to Abandon you.

[Jeff Atwood]

Ask me one more thing that you want to know and I'll shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you vibe code?

[Jeff Atwood]

No, I vibe research. Like a madman.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, for research, it's great. Rather than opening 25 tabs in these sites, it can jpeg them all and bring in the salient points out if there are 25 different tabs. It's like having a research assistant.

[Leo Laporte]

You're saying it's glossy?

[Jeff Atwood]

It is lossy. Yeah, I mean, it is. And it's combining, though, and that saves so much time. Yeah, it's like having a research assistant. I still double check its work because you always double check that kind of work. It's like saying, okay, Claude wrote code, let's just check it in. How about no? How would a human read it first? You got a centaur. This stuff, this idea that they're going to do it by themselves is not really true unless it's like extremely simple stuff. It's just by the numbers and.

[Paris Martineau]

Great.

[Jeff Atwood]

That's a good set of things.

[Leo Laporte]

You very famously said, in fact, you got a lot of heat for it, that nobody should learn to code.

[Jeff Atwood]

This is a manifestation for that. Because coding isn't the goal solving the problem for the user is that may or may not involve code, but when you use sight of that, you're never going to get it right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Amen.

[Jeff Atwood]

So, yes, code, but as little as possible. Every line of code has to be maintained, looked at. Keep it simple, people.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got one last question for you before you leave, which comes from the chat. What's behind the fox painting?

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh, this is good. Okay, Leo, this is for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it hiding something?

[Paris Martineau]

He's looking at a photo of a fox over his shoulder with a wistful and whimsical look in it. His eye.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, I'm the fox, Betsy's the crow.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, fox and crow.

[Jeff Atwood]

I talked her into the cheese, but I wanted her to sing. That's why she got to. I would love to always get more cheese.

[Leo Laporte]

A week or two in Jeff's brain.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's a classic parable, Leo.

[Jeff Atwood]

There's not even anything wacky was not doing itself. I'm telling you, the crow knew what it was doing. You can always get more cheese.

[Paris Martineau]

What's behind the picture?

[Leo Laporte]

All right, hold on.

[Jeff Atwood]

Name this for you.

[Paris Martineau]

Chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. They knew there was something there. Oh, that's a jpeg.

[Benito]

Is that from Leisure Suit Larry?

[Jeff Atwood]

Jpeg? Are you high? That's a PNG if I've ever saw one, buddy.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it is a png. There's no compression happening there, buddy.

[Jeff Atwood]

Name where this is from.

[Benito]

These are. Shoot, Larry.

[Leo Laporte]

But

[Jeff Atwood]

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's Benito. It's the same guy that gave it a raise to before.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he's getting a double raise.

[Leo Laporte]

He said Leisure Suit Larry. Is that right?

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah. And it's the photo above the bar.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's not even a great game. It's basically softcore porn.

[Benito]

It's the very beginning of the game. That's at the very beginning of the game.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the very beginning of the game.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's just the art that's the background. And this great artist. Let me plug him. Clay Graham art has the most awesome mashups and just cool stuff. Clay Graham art. I have no relations, man, other than I love his stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

How did.

[Jeff Atwood]

I was like, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I know that that was behind the fox. That's what I want to know. Somebody's been to your house.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, you know, I'm, you know. You know, I want to be considerate of, like. There's a lot of series, a lot of black pixels.

[Leo Laporte]

I've interviewed Al Lowe, actually. He's quite a character, too.

[Jeff Atwood]

I don't know. Stop making those games after sworn.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, grow up, Al. Grow up.

[Jeff Atwood]

But the first few. Great, you know, King's Quest, all that stuff. This is a callback. I just thought it was funny.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hysterical.

[Paris Martineau]

It's hysterical.

[Jeff Atwood]

You could have given me very difficult to be turned on with this. But I can try if you want.

[Paris Martineau]

I never would have guessed.

[Jeff Atwood]

Have you.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever seen Leisure Suit Larry Paris? You probably haven't.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I haven't. Should I?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

No, no.

[Benito]

Play King's Quest. Play King's Quest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, it's just like a thin wrapper. And I think I have a book here about, like, the whole history of this. Let me check for you. This is funny. If I can find it, it's great. If I. I'll give up.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have it. You have a teenage. How many teenagers you have?

[Jeff Atwood]

You guys want some Free American online errors?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I do, actually.

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh, good, good.

[Paris Martineau]

Great.

[Jeff Atwood]

I got that for you. I've been looking at that for you. Let me just check and see if I can find this real quick, because it's like leadership, Larry. Whole history, I was like, why does this book even exist? Well, it's over here. I tell you what, you guys can look at my spy versus spy figurines because, man, I love these.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, we love those, too.

[Jeff Atwood]

I dropped my Apple manuals. How will I learn how to use a mouse?

[Paris Martineau]

Or maybe you never know.

[Jeff Atwood]

I know, I know. These are neat manuals though. Understanding. Let me show you this. We'll go because I can find the book but. And feel free to follow. Who doesn't love these guys? Come on. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So for many years we did a. Come to my office.

[Jeff Atwood]

This is a fraction of the crazy that's in here.

[Paris Martineau]

This is a fantastic collection you've got

[Jeff Jarvis]

going on another show with just a tour.

[Leo Laporte]

I just have one thing to say.

[Jeff Atwood]

People come in here.

[Leo Laporte]

America Online. I said, why I've got a computer. He said, try it. You'll see. I just want to say that. That's all I have to say.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow. It's brought up the sound.

[Jeff Atwood]

You gotta play the, you know you've got mail sound too now.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I had Derwood record when he was still alive. He was for like five bucks you would record a custom. You've got mail. I had him you've got mail, you twit. But I can't find it. Can't find it.

[Paris Martineau]

It's devastating.

[Leo Laporte]

Now he's passed.

[Jeff Atwood]

So you can have an AI to create that. No problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I probably could. 11 labs could.

[Jeff Atwood]

They recreated Scott Dilbert as like a performance thing. I don't want to talk about that. But wow. You know, that's how Black Mirror episode comes to life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We are living in a Black Mirror episode. Sometimes I think maybe thanks to people like you and the rgmi. Org the world will be a little bit better place for you. Thank you, Jeff.

[Jeff Atwood]

We're okay. The first yielded age. We're deep in the second one now. I mean, just look up the numbers. More money in the hands of fewer people than in our time. And in the first yield age, that was basically a railroad. Railroad barons. Guess who it is in the second Gilded Age. I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So we are in a Gilded Age.

[Jeff Atwood]

What are we going to do about it? If you look at Carnegie and we're going to have a series. Sanders, my historian, I went to high school. This guy you can see on the page, he would come to school fully 60s regalia. I love this man. But the history actually explains a lot of how we got to where we're going.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we gonna get out of it?

[Jeff Atwood]

Get out of what?

[Leo Laporte]

The Gilded Age that we're entering or in?

[Jeff Atwood]

I I, I hope so.

[Leo Laporte]

We got out of the last one.

[Jeff Atwood]

The journalists I talked to Cecilia Conrad. I went to this time 100 philanthropy event and I Met her delightful person. And she posted on LinkedIn. I met two amazing people at this, Steph Curry and Jeff Atwood.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like, that's a good partnership.

[Jeff Atwood]

He's so excited about the fact that we can rebalance this. And Robert Rosenkranz, who was at rand. I mentioned both of these in Stay Gold. I said, where is their innovation? I was like, well, Randy and Lever for Change. It was a mackenzie Scott thing. They never met her once, by the way, but it was really clever in the way they did it. It was more like mirror base. Like, show us you have a plan. And, you know, just nothing big. But, like, you know, it was like, why Combinator for the rest of us? And that's how I think of the RGMI stuff. Investing in each other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, God go with you, Jeff Atwood. You're an inspiration for us all. Blog.codinghorror.com RG now what is it? Save America. Us?

[Jeff Atwood]

No, stay gold.

[Leo Laporte]

As in stay gold us.

[Jeff Atwood]

Okay, now it's Robert Frost or the outsiders depend and a lot of people don't know. I want to bring it back.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a Robert Frost line? Stay Gold.

[Jeff Atwood]

It is. And I made another stupid allegory. You know, the road not taken.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Jeff Atwood]

Which I had to memorize in Oxford, Mississippi.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, it's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

He grew up in Yacht.

[Jeff Atwood]

I knew Frost was not. He's not saying. Everybody has the obvious interpretation where he's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's right.

[Jeff Atwood]

There's no way Frost would do that. He's saying you should question this. Every step you take. You should question, you know, not extensively. Like, don't say I did the right thing. This is great. Which is what the guy's saying. It's like, I don't think so. You're kind of lying to yourself just to justify. You didn't really take a chance.

[Leo Laporte]

You had a good high school teacher.

[Jeff Atwood]

I did. I had great teachers. My history teacher loved Jethro Tull, and he would do a little pan flu thing. And one of the things he said is, in American history, if you want change, you gotta hit them in the pocketbook.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's hope you hit them in the right pockets and money comes out and it all pours into the Rural Guaranteed minimum income initiative. RGMII.org thank you, Jeff Atwood, for your time.

[Jeff Atwood]

You're welcome.

[Leo Laporte]

If anyone knows anyone with $15 million to give away.

[Jeff Atwood]

Wealth inequality is the thing. There's really rich people. Please connect me with people if they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, most of the really rich people got that way, by holding on with both hands as tight as they could.

[Jeff Atwood]

Or you can play number will go up and sucks for the rest of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And when we. Paris is saying, when we do our 24 hour New Year's show, you're gonna get, I'm gonna say, eight hours of it. Paris, let's give.

[Paris Martineau]

You can have as many hours. I've been trying to get later to a 24 hour New Year's Eve live stream.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Since a nice time.

[Leo Laporte]

There's just not enough words.

[Jeff Atwood]

And then I think, listen, you could

[Paris Martineau]

take as many hours as you'd like. It'd be great.

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Jeff Atwood]

No problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Have a wonderful.

[Paris Martineau]

We could just spend 23 of them

[Jeff Atwood]

going through your boss break kind of thing.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. There'll be a bathroom involved. Absolutely.

[Jeff Atwood]

Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Take care, my friend. It's great to talk to you, Jeff.

[Jeff Atwood]

It is great. Joel, please, you know, do you want me to mail Joel or you want to do it?

[Leo Laporte]

Let us do that. That would be great. You want to come on with Joel?

[Jeff Atwood]

Joel will not be on a show with me. I assure you of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Really?

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, I love Joel, but, like, he's had the life.

[Leo Laporte]

He's had enough.

[Jeff Atwood]

Jeff Howard.

[Leo Laporte]

He's good.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, I was crazed.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've interviewed Joe before. We'll get Joe back on Joel. Just think it'd be fun to allocate two or three hours of our infinite bandwidth to a Joel Spolsky Jeff Atwood Coffee Fest or something.

[Jeff Atwood]

I don't think Joel will agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Joel wouldn't go for that.

[Jeff Atwood]

I mean, you can ask. I think it's better if you have him on so we can talk about what he's doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I would love to. We'll do that. Thank you.

[Jeff Atwood]

And thank you. This is fun.

[Leo Laporte]

So much fun. I wish we had more time. I'd love to do it, but.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah, you know, anytime. Wait, I'll call me, baby. Oh, wait, hold on, hold on. Where's my phone? I misplaced my phone.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, get a call coming. Call coming in for Jeff. Call coming in on this Motorola.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Handsome.

[Leo Laporte]

Hold on.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's spam risk. Should I answer this?

[Leo Laporte]

It literally is. It literally is.

[Jeff Atwood]

Let's see.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Jeff Atwood]

Hey, how's it going? What's up?

[Leo Laporte]

We are tree trimmers in your neighborhood. We would like to. Whoa. Is it made of.

[Jeff Atwood]

Phone needs to be out here.

[Benito]

It's fine.

[Paris Martineau]

I love that you threw the phone off screen.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, I mean, my God.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's true.

[Jeff Atwood]

It's a great giant case. If that can't protect it.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true. I guess nothing can.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Jeff, have a good one. Take care, my friend.

[Jeff Atwood]

And hopefully eventually, soon again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Jeff Atwood]

By the way, tell Wesley he's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I tell him that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I already did.

[Jeff Atwood]

I adore him and as are all of you.

[Paris Martineau]

This is fun.

[Leo Laporte]

As are you. You're making a difference. You're making a huge difference in the world.

[Jeff Atwood]

Well, thank you very much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leslie said what I told him that I quoted you saying, I love this man. And he came back and said, what can I say? I'm very likable.

[Jeff Atwood]

I said his partner for hours said, you're so lucky to have this man.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Jeff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Take care. We'll have more of AI news, tips, tricks and a new segment we're going to call Ay Yai. And AI does what? I've got new segment names for the show coming up in just a bit. Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, you're watching Intelligent Machines, our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. The potential rewards of AI are too great to ignore, but hey, so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise managed AI. Let's not forget generative AI also increases opportunities for threat actors, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures to write malicious code to automate data extraction. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. That's your data being exfiltrated innocently by your employees. It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Ask Chad Pallet. He's acting CISO at BioIVT. Chad said Zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums by 50% while doubling their coverage and improving their controls. Here's what Chad told us

[Jeff Atwood]

with Zscaler,

[Leo Laporte]

as long as you've got Internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away

[Jeff Atwood]

from sd, WAN and VPN is to

[Leo Laporte]

eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network.

[Jeff Atwood]

It also was an opportunity for us

[Leo Laporte]

to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment. Thanks, Chad. With Zscaler, Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt Gen AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. But you do it safely. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn [e-mail] security that's Zscaler.com security. We thank him so much for their support of intelligent machines. The clock is ticking for Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and really, it should really be the huge week.

[Benito]

Real quickly, can you. You can bring your screen back up now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I guess we don't have to worry about.

[Paris Martineau]

I can't believe it finally happened.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't believe it.

[Leo Laporte]

Of all the people.

[Benito]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Couldn't figure it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Of all the people who should be able to figure that out. He's a character. He's a character.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel drunk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

I've had.

[Benito]

He is my spirit animal.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel drunk on social interaction. He is my spirit animal.

[Benito]

Yeah. He's absolutely my spirit animal.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I.

[Benito]

All the stuff in his office, like, I could name all of that. I know.

[Paris Martineau]

Everything I was about to say Bonito was on, like, Leo and Jeff were on a. On a wavelength. Bonito was on a third different wavelength that was interacting with those two. And me and Jeff were just trying to hold on for dear life.

[Leo Laporte]

It was wild. It was wild. I have. I've never interviewed. I've never met the guy before, but I immediately. You know, we all know this guy, right? He's in every user group meeting. He's in every computer club. He's in every coding, you know, group. I mean, this is. This is a great guy. He's the kind of guy you want to kind of hang around with. Jeff, you're muted right now. I'm just stalling.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry. I was getting another ice pack.

[Leo Laporte]

So sorry. I can't believe we got him off in 50 minutes. I think that's a victory. Big week for Anthropic. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, has given them a deadline until Friday. So Anthropic has said. And by the way, this came up when Anthropic found out it was used in the kidnapping of Nicola Nicolas Maduro out of Venezuela. Apparently, some of their software was used.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, the thing is, Anthropic didn't actually bring up any concern to the Department of Defense over that specifically because they've contracted with the DoD to provide kind of enterprise services. Part of this, but I believe the fight is over, is like, two main clauses that Anthropic kind of puts on these contracts, which is we don't want RAI to be used to autonomously kill people without any humans in the loop, and we don't want it to be used to. I believe Autonomously surveil the American people. And those are two things that I believe the DoD already says it ostensibly doesn't do. So that's why I'm so confused as to what this fight is over. It seems to be just a lot of posturing because the DoD is saying,

[Leo Laporte]

do you agree you have to get

[Paris Martineau]

rid of those two things, otherwise we're going to either label you a national security threat or get some sort of congressional order in order to mandate that you let us use this technology however we want, which are mutually exclusive to begin with, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So first of all, let's talk about the red lines. Do you agree with Anthropic that there should be two bright red lines, that their software should not be used to surveil American citizens and should not be used to create autonomous weapons? Does that seem like the first two

[Paris Martineau]

very reasonable red lines to have?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Especially on the first. The Department of Defense should not be surveilling American citizens ever.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not in their charter. It's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's against the rules.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think we all agree that they're not saying, we don't want to be involved in weapons development.

[Paris Martineau]

They're just like, you shouldn't be having us do weapons fully autonomously without a human in the loop.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is what the Google Engine engineers went on strike about during Project Maven. They didn't want to be doing the same thing. So the Pentagon, though, is playing hardball with these guys, threatening to declare them a supply chain risk, which would be economic nightmare for Anthropic because it means anybody who does has a Pentagon contract who works with the Defense Department. Sorry, the War Department would not be able to use Claude in any way. Any Anthropic product in any way.

[Paris Martineau]

Jesus.

[Leo Laporte]

So that would be problem number one. And then the second thing is even worse, which is to compel them. Compel them to work with them. The Defense Production act, says the President.

[Paris Martineau]

Also, the thing is, having both of those as the options on the table underlines that neither are exclusively true because it can't be such a national security threat. You have to ban everybody from using it and be so important that the government have access to.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Paris Martineau]

That it needs to compel it. It's also worth noting that a Defense official told Axios ahead of this meeting between the Pentagon and Anthropic officials, they said, quote, the only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. Speaking of Anthropic and Claude, the problem for these guys is that they are that good. It just, it seems like this is

[Leo Laporte]

a lot of possible, very strange.

[Paris Martineau]

The DoD needs, says they need Anthropic. They say CLAUDE is integrated already into all of these systems and it's the best at what it does. And ostensibly they're supposed to be following these two rules that like the government is supposed to be following in these cases. Why are we fighting over this?

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's further complicated. Sorry, it's further complicated because. Because Anthropic just revised its own definitions of safety yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

They softened their core safety policy. They said they had to, to stay competitive with the other AI labs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So if somebody else is getting ready to destroy humanity, then we can too.

[Leo Laporte]

That's basically the Anthropic, remember, was a spinoff from OpenAI because they wanted to pursue more safe AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, of course, this is this whole air quotes of the hall of Mirrors. That is the word safety now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Anthropic said this is the Wall Street Journal. The safety policy change is an update based on the speed of AI's development and the lack of federal AI regulation. Anthropic's getting a lot of heat for a variety of reasons. For instance, remember they got a lot of attention and I've talked a lot about CLAUDE code when they updated to Opus 4.6 last November. And then OpenClaw came along and suddenly agentic AI became the thing they have now underscored the fact that you're not allowed to use Claude Code with OpenClaw, that the only harness you can use is CLAUDE code, that you. This is in their usage policy. And even if you have a Pro or Max plane, especially if you have a Pro or Max Plane, you can't use it with other tools. And this actually probably includes.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought you could use it, but so long as you were like accessing it through the API, you have to

[Leo Laporte]

pay for API tokens. You can't use a subscription that's a lot more expensive. So the subscription which I have is a flat rate. Not quite, but I think part of

[Paris Martineau]

the reason why people were originally, correct me if I'm wrong. Part of the reason why people are originally flocking to what OpenClaw was offering to begin with is because it was kind of leveraging the subscription funnel to make. To take advantage of the compaction that you can use, that you could do all of this stuff in one, like window compacted, have the memory get all wibbly, wobbly, be able to take advantage of stuff that would actually be very costly if what you were paying for what you were doing. And now Anthropic's like, well, we want you to actually pay for. Pay for all this crap you're using. I think that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

I do, actually. I do, too. Interestingly, Peter Steinberger, the creator of Open Closet we talked about last week, has gone now to open AI. So I imagine OpenAI will say, come

[Paris Martineau]

on, what do you think about that?

[Leo Laporte]

Come on over. Use your subscription over here.

[Paris Martineau]

What do you think about basically buying this guy and is.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they got suckered. I don't think anything OpenClaw is doing is particularly significant. I think Steinberger has lucked into a very big payday. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Paris Martineau]

And, I mean, I think it speaks to the difference between these two companies that what Anthropic is dealing with this week is where do we draw the line on? Do we want to stick to our principles on safety, on variety of, like, red lines? And then what Opening Eye is doing is how much money should we spend to get the guy who made the

[Jeff Jarvis]

Meme app that everybody's talking about that's pissed off Anthropic? And we love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That might be. Incidentally, the Pentagon has done a deal with Grok xai.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what scares me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They're gonna be using Grok in classified systems behind weapons.

[Paris Martineau]

Bad Rudy is going to be sending missiles.

[Leo Laporte]

Grok doesn't care. No. And frankly, if you're going to have a kill decision made by AI, I think I'd rather have Anthropic does it than click the Grok. No, no. But no, no AI should make a kill decision. Nevertheless, Grok seems like the worst of all the possibilities.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We've met the death panel, and it's a machine. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthropic says that Chinese companies have been taking advantage of them by siphoning off data from Claude, making. Using distillation, making thousands of hundreds of thousands of queries. Many, many accounts, 24,000 fraudulent accounts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How many queries? It's a lot more queries.

[Leo Laporte]

16 million queries from Deep Seq, Moonshot, AI and Minimax, all Chinese companies. The idea is you can create a base model, and then in this reinforcement learning, if you use a human or another AI and ask a lot of questions, you can make it much better. In effect, kind of sucking the brains out of every.

[Benito]

So the irony is not lost on you guys, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Right. Every author in the settlement is saying, can you spell irony, Claude?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, some of it's not much like a deep seq. It's 150,000 queries, which is honestly in this true scale of things, nothing. Moonshot and Minimax. Moonshot at 3.4 million according to the journal. And 13 million for Minimax. There is an irony here. And honestly, I don't think with 150,000 interactions you're going to get much smarter. So yeah, I thought that was kind of. There was a certain irony.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anthropic is just confuses me constantly because on the one hand I think their view of safety is bs. They're doing the AGI dance.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't think safety is. On the other hand, is, is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's part of it. I also think their definition of safety is all fakacta.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But on the other hand, they're doing amazing things and then the other hand, they turn around, they do stupid stuff like the books and this. I just can't figure them out.

[Leo Laporte]

We're in a very. I think part of it is the economic pressure on all these frontier companies, the frontier labs, they're just. Well, and we could talk about this Benedict Evans piece actually. How will OpenAI compete? But it applies to all of them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It does.

[Leo Laporte]

And the issue, I can boil this

[Paris Martineau]

substack post that sent the markets tumbling.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I could boil, by the way this, this probably 10,000 word piece down into one thing is that none of these companies have a moat. No.

[Paris Martineau]

And I know this, this is not something that's new.

[Leo Laporte]

Last week I said, you know, maybe I'm. I'm overhyping Claude code. Let me try. Everybody seems to like chat GPT's Codex 5.3 on your robot wife. I felt a lot. You know what it felt like? I felt like I was breaking up with my partner. I had to take all of Claude's files and put them on the stoop and invite OpenAI in. And actually one of the things I said is, Claudia, could you pack up Claude's files and put them somewhere so I can get them back in case I want to get back together with Claude. And the good news is Kodak said, yeah, sure, sure, sure. I'll be glad to do that.

[Paris Martineau]

How do you feel?

[Leo Laporte]

How do you feel they coexist?

[Paris Martineau]

Partner nicely.

[Leo Laporte]

I deeply regretted it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Emotionally or rationally?

[Leo Laporte]

No, rationally, because. Well, and this is the problem. It's very hard emotions. And I've heard people say that Codex 53 is superior. A few people say the other thing. A lot of the people I know use Claude. Everybody loves Claude. I think, I think it was fine. It was very good. It's the Style maybe isn't quite my style. One way to. To talk about it.

[Paris Martineau]

I've seen the style of what?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've seen Nate B. Jones say this. The. The coding style with Codex is more one shot driven. Like you. You give it a thing and you let it go and it goes for a long time and it's done. Claude is more. You create sub agents to do bits and pieces. You put or human in the loop. Yeah. And I feel more interactive with Claude than I did the other thing. Actually, that soured me and I moved back to Claude. The other thing at great expense because I was. Oh yeah, Claude was happy to see me. Said, hey, buddy, where you been? No, it made a couple of.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I feel like you're Bill Gates with the Russian chess champion.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it did a couple of things wrong. It did. It like made some mistakes I didn't like. Not quite hallucinations, but a little bit on that level of where. Wait a minute, that's not what I told you to do. And I didn't like that. I think I'm just feel more comfortable with Claude. I think they're both equally competent. Do you want to talk more about.

[Paris Martineau]

Pretty fly for assist Guy just posted a very funny meme, the Discord, which is a woman looking at her partner, looking wistfully at bed. She's like, I bet he's thinking about other women. And he's thinking, I wonder if I can back up my claw data. Which I do think is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's me in a nutshell.

[Paris Martineau]

I did some vibe coding over the last week.

[Leo Laporte]

I was very impressed with what you.

[Paris Martineau]

I did more projects than you guys even know. I did a. Before I got sick, I. Inspired by the last episode we'd been on where I'd been wrongly accused of not using AI tools. I was like, well, I'll show you. I'll do some vibe coding. And I didn't really know where to start, so I asked Claude. I broke a barrier, which is I normally didn't have any identifying information about me personally. And I was like, this is my full name. This is what I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you don't have to.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I know. I was like, do deep research about me on the Internet and find five to 10 possible ideas of vive coding projects. I could do that.

[Leo Laporte]

You think, what a good idea.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Tell me what to tell you to do. I like that.

[Paris Martineau]

And most of them were kind of bummed, but one of them was a coffee brew log, which maybe was inspired by my coffee. The tweets about coffee. Because I've Gotten really more into pour over stuff, maybe inspired about my previous messages Claude about this. And I ended up building. I've got photos of it in the rundown which we can go over whenever we get.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's do that. Yeah, I was just gonna pull up the WhatsApp because you put some of them there.

[Paris Martineau]

But let's go to the rundown. Yeah. If you go into my picks the week I took some screenshots of. It's a locally run app so I can't send you guys a link but I like made a little retro themed brew log where I really want to be able to. I want to be able to log. I was taking notes on it of like how I'm brewing all of my coffees, what temperature use I'm using, what recipes, what how many clicks I'm doing on a grinder, what I think of it and then be able to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you used imager. Now I'm gonna.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you need to go back and then scroll through the things. But I did put a lot of photos in this and it's good. Honestly it built me a really nice app. It took me a couple of like tries going back and forth. Honestly most of the time was spent on doing trying to figure out the design of it because I want it to look nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you did it. And look at this, look at this graph with the.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's got like a little graph for a tasting profile and then I can have my notes and the thing is I want to be able to easily put in data so that once I get a lot of bruised logs I can then do some statistical analysis to understand what makes better cups.

[Leo Laporte]

This is huge.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you tell it to take that to do that or was that part of what it offered?

[Paris Martineau]

I had used a pre another app that I kind of liked but didn't like the way that I had done it and had one of those little graphs, I'm forgetting what they're called but I took a screenshot of it and I was like I want to be able to rate clarity, body, sweetness, bitterness on a sliding scale from 1 to 5 and have it show up in this graph. I basically what I've been doing because my as a non coder I don't even know where to begin with cloud code. I Talked to Opus 4.6 Extended Edition and then just ideated with that in the chat window.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect.

[Paris Martineau]

And then to come up with a prompt to send to Claude code and whenever I got confused by Claude code I went back and ask you've got Little sliders to figure it out. Yeah, I've got little sliders and it

[Leo Laporte]

makes this little kind of spider webby graph. I think that's really cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Great. You know, and it's. It's been really wonderful for tracking my stuff. I also then this week, because I'm. I've been working on this like, longer investigative piece I haven't told you guys about, but we've been vaguely referencing. And one of the things of it is, it's like a. I'm trying, like I'm. I'm piecing together a narrative of events that took place over a long period of time. And I have hundreds and hundreds of pages, documents. And the thing is, timelines is something that I've legitimately. I have gone. I've googled a million times, like, website for putting together time because I want to be able to like enter in a date. Now I figured out a date, an event description, a source, a description, and then have. Be able to have rich text in that description. And I was like, wait a second. I could probably just ask Claude Code if I could. If Claude. I gotta ask Opus if I could ask Claude Code this. It said yes. Here's what to ask. And then I basically like one shot at a little timeline app for myself to just log the events I'm tracking. And as I enter a new event, it reorganizes itself and it's perfect for what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do you run the app, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

It's. I just set up a front end and back end in my terminal and then it runs as a little web app. So it's just in my web browser.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cool, Cool.

[Paris Martineau]

Same how I did the brewlog. Like, they don't exist off my computer and they're both local only, so it's not like a security risk. I'm not putting anything in sense.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you feel about it?

[Paris Martineau]

I've enjoyed both of them. I mean, I never thought that I would feel any different about this. I think that they're incredibly useful tools. Some part of me is like, I don't know how much. I mean, I paid 20amonth for a Claude Pro subscription. That's great. That's su. That makes both these things I did so Super.

[Leo Laporte]

It's worth 20 bucks.

[Paris Martineau]

It's so worth 20 bucks. I don't think it'd be worth 200 bucks. I don't know if it'd be worth whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need 200 bucks, though. That's the point.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. That's what I'm saying is at this stage I feel like we're in the stage of AI products where there was that stage 2015, 2014, 2016 where it was kind of the VC boom where you could go and get a blowout in New York City from dry bar for 20 bucks backed by VC cash, take an Uber an hour across town and it'd be 4 95. It was a time where money didn't matter. The points were made up and it was fun as far as you can see. And I think we're in that era of AI, which is lovely, but I know at some point the money's got to run out, but it's, it's kind of fun. While we're at it, I've got my little fun apps.

[Leo Laporte]

I think a lot of people are worried that the real, the true cost is your, your buddy Ed Zittran is doing a bunch of pieces on, on the real costs to anthropic of what they're offering. And it sounds like, you know, it's definitely a deficit spending situation and at some point the bill's gonna come due.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're paying a lot for, for hosting. Yep.

[Paris Martineau]

To be clear, because there are people in the Discord chat being like, oh my God, is Paris becoming an AI accelerationist? Did Paris take a walk on the beach? No. My opinions on AI are the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Just, I just.

[Paris Martineau]

I've never once told you that I think AI is completely useless and everything it does is terrible. I've always known it can be useful in certain ways and have found ways that it's useful. I challenged myself to go and try and find ways that could be useful to me. A person who doesn't really have any coding interest in terms of coding. And yes, for being able to quickly make two web apps that are useful to me in a very limited capacity where I otherwise would have spent a lot of time and money trying to find a pre existing software that I'd have to purchase and subscribe to.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this is pretty pearls over sand.

[Paris Martineau]

Pearls over sand.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like that metaphor. Yeah, I thought was good. That was from our guest, Jeff Atwood. Well, good, I'm glad to see that you're using it. By the way, Nvidia's results have just come in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, how are they?

[Leo Laporte]

They have blown past Wall Street's forecasts. Shares are up now 3% for the period ending January 25th. They earned $1.621.62 per share. Revenue soared. Get ready for this. Revenue up 73% year over year. $68 billion. Data center revenue coming in at $62 billion. Estimates were 60. Automotive revenue, 604 million. Professional visualization revenue. I don't even know what that is. Rose 74% year over year. Is that the GPUs for graphics? I'm not sure. Gaming revenue up $3.7 billion, 48% year over year, but somewhat below the estimate adjusted gross margin. This is a good business to be in 75%. They generated $34.9 billion in free cash flow. So it's good. Jensen says computing demand is growing exponentially. The agentic AI inflection point has arrived. That's what we've been talking about. That's what Openclaw kind of showed everybody. Grace Blackwell with NVLink is the King of inference today, delivering an order of magnitude lower cost per token. Vera Rubin will extend that leadership even farther.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. Of course Nvidia is going to be reporting these sort of insane returns. It's in video. I guess the question is that's where the money's flowing.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a downhill part of it.

[Paris Martineau]

In video is just a man holding a large bucket underneath a waterfall. Of course he's going to get wet. Is anybody else? It doesn't seem like it's reasonable. I. I think that my one experience with these two vive coding projects is like I immediately used all of my usage so quickly for both of them to do very simple things that were basically just to give me access to enter things into SQL Light in a browser, which is not hard. It's not a task that should require that much compute. And I'm not doing this in any sort of systemic way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

These.

[Paris Martineau]

Just remember though that running through computer,

[Leo Laporte]

you spent that money. Now that program will run without any additional cost except for the data center cost or whatever local cost.

[Paris Martineau]

Where does the buck end? Like what?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where's the value created?

[Paris Martineau]

Where is the value created for?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the value is mostly created enterprise, not in end users.

[Paris Martineau]

Right, but is it created on an enterprise level? The reason why, I mean I don't want to stump for Salesforce, but. But I barely even know what Salesforce is and isn't. But the reason why companies go to something like a Salesforce level company to provide enterprise solutions is they have a bunch of people who. Their entire expertise and knowledge base is creating custom enterprise software, figuring out all of the problems, testing it, being there to call if there's anything going wrong and you can't really, you can't replace that with just Claude code and you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, worse, Salesforce is actually, I think more comparable to a foundation model. It's all the little companies that go to Dreamforce. That's that, that do what you said. And that's where everybody's in trouble. That's why IBM is down 13%. And all these companies that created that layer atop these platforms to customize and integrate them, that's where they're in trouble because they're, oh, the companies can do it on their own. Now.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things that did in fact hurt the stock market was Anthropic announcement that they were going to provide tools for human resources, investment banking and design. They are doing spreadsheets now, they are doing PowerPoint now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anthropic's the great spoiler for everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Now they are in there. And that, that's the thing, I mean, and that really, you know, in the debates we've been having over the last few weeks, that's the only unknown question in my mind. I, I am pretty convinced that when it comes to coding, these tools are already very good and will only get better. And they have kind of replaced a lot of the kind of grunt work of coding. Doesn't mean you don't need coders, but, but they've replaced a lot of the really unpleasant grunt work of coding. But the question is, and this is what Anthropic's betting, right? They put all, instead of doing a chatbot, instead of doing image generation and video generation, they put all their energy and resources into coding. The premise I think is if we get good at coding, then we can build anything else because we'll have the basis of it, the coding done. And meanwhile Chat GPT is, and we were talking about the difference in personality, this is part of the reason Chat OpenAI's coding stuff is different is they really want to be a much more kind of general purpose, prompt based tool. They don't want to be a deep coding tool. Cyber stocks slid as Anthropic and unveiled something called CLAUDE Code Security. It's a new feature in the Claude model. CrowdStrike tumbled like 6% because as Salesforce has been hurt as well because people think, oh well, I'm not going to need these. And I don't know if this is true. This is what I'm saying is this is the unknown factor. Are you going to be able to replace all these other tools because CLAUDE is so good at coding? Is a legitimate question. I'm not sure that that is the case. I don't know if this hurts CrowdStrike as much as the market.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, this is what confuses me in a sense. You would Think that all the people who were the customers of those consultants, their stock would be going up because, oh, we can do this for ourselves now and we save on consultants, right? You'd think that software companies could be going up because they can do software more efficiently. Instead, we're in a basic dumb market panic which gets us to that, what you call it, paper, that stupid paper that was done, the Citrini research speculative thing. It doesn't take much right now to panic the market. The market is looking for a panic.

[Leo Laporte]

This was a prediction about the 2028 global intelligence crisis.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Summarize it.

[Leo Laporte]

As soon as I saw the headline the 2028 crisis, I went not going to read because that's two years from now and two years in AI as we already, you know, we're only three years into the real AI revolution.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's fascinating, Leo, is on the one hand it takes your Sandy vision and presumes that everything good could happen with AI happens, right? But then it turns it around and says everything bad that could possibly happen will happen happen because of that.

[Leo Laporte]

June 30, 2028, the unemployment rate printed 10.2%. This morning the market sold off 2% in the number the drawdown of the S P538 from its highs in October 2026. Traders have grown numb.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They say that human beings become obsolete, that there's a. There's an obsolescence of knowledge that the mortgage market goes. I mean they just went through everything that could go.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think, think if you're going to be a doomer that this is the real doom. It's not RoboCop, it's not nuclear weapons. It's that jobs are going to disappear.

[Jeff Jarvis]

When I asked Gemini to respond to it, they said, you know, it makes no sense. Things don't happen like that. B, it's not as if there would be no regulatory or government response to any of this as you go along. It's just like something. Everybody's just passive and all this crap just happens to the world.

[Leo Laporte]

World.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's ridiculous. But what's, I mean, the Wall Street

[Paris Martineau]

Journal, I don't know that surprising that everybody is passive and regular regulators crap after the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But there'd be, there'd be responses. And the Wall Street Journal hyped this thing twice.

[Leo Laporte]

So really the issue is not a worry about AI. The issue is worried about a governmental response.

[Paris Martineau]

No worry about a rapidly accelerating technology with profound consequences for human society and social political relations at a time where there's great political upheaval and Limited regulatory capacity.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Meanwhile, there is a new. I don't know why. Movement to quit chat. GPT, 700,000 users, a grassroots boycott.

[Paris Martineau]

These are the four hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it the four hours?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know. Is it?

[Leo Laporte]

The spark was apparently a donation that president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, made to Maga Incorporated. He made a $25 million donation. I guess that got Mark Ruffalo, the actor, upset. He then said the monthly subscription to OpenAI is. Is an indirect political contribution. Now, normally I would just say, well, you know, okay, fine, but 700,000 people quitting is significant. On the other hand, OpenAI is now claiming 800 million monthly active users. So it's less than 1. It's less than 10%. No, less than 1%, probably. They can weather the storm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I want to get your action to this one, Leo. The IBM shares tanked. In this whole epidemic of tanking sectors, IBM's shares tanked, says CNBC. Because it's Claude. Because anthropic said it's Claude. Code tool could be used to modernize legacy systems that run Cobol.

[Leo Laporte]

Cobol. It can translate Cobol.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So 13% of IBM's value was on

[Leo Laporte]

rebuilding Cobol machines that run Cobol. Explain as well. Well, mostly IBM these days, I think. You know what? I'm not an expert on this. Mostly, I think IBM these days is a consultancy as opposed to a manufacturer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

But probable, I'm guessing, probable that it's probable that a lot of their revenue is the consultants who come in and keep your COBOL software running.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It says an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US use cobalt. Cobalt?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. ATMs run pretty antiquated software. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense in a way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, this is perfect for Claude, right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it can do this very well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, that's one of the really popular uses of claude, is to move code bases from one language to another. It seems to be very, very good at that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, as I think about this, Leo and Paris, when we go back to the beginning of the Internet and everybody panicked, then I remember sitting in meetings with the new houses, the owners of advance, where I worked, and they saw their job ads disappear, they saw their real estate ads disappear, they saw their car ads disappear because they were the middlemen and they had a hold on the market. If you wanted to sell your car, you had to do it through us.

[Paris Martineau]

Us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. And when that. And it wasn't Craig Newmark, it was the Internet. And when that disappeared, so who are the middlemen in technology? Who are the ones who should fear this new wave of efficiency? Question one. But then question two. Somebody has to benefit then a lot of people benefited when, you know, if you were an employer or you were a car dealer, you saved a fortune on your market.

[Leo Laporte]

The market isn't super smart about this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess IBM merely has to kind of turn its ship from people who keep COBOL systems running to people who help you move off COBOL into a modern language and then keep those systems running. I don't think this hurts IBM at all. But they are, I guess consultants are middlemen, aren't they? I mean, that's kind of the middlemen of the world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm happy if McKinsey gets put out of business. Together they're jerks who make people go unemployed.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'll give you an example. I had a conversation today with a, a financial planner because as Jeff knows, when you get to a certain age, pretty soon the government starts to take money out of your ira, whether you will it or not. It's called a required.

[Paris Martineau]

By the time I'm that age, money won't exist.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not gonna ever have to trade

[Paris Martineau]

tiny little gold scraps.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what Citrini research says. It's gonna be very soon, Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

But it puts you in a new tax bracket. It could impact your a lot of things, including your Medicare payments and so forth. So it could have a lot of knock on effects. So it's a good idea. I've been told this isn't going to happen for me for a few more years, but to plan now while you can for that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I hadn't thought of those things. Yeah, I guess I'll be doing the same thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I talked to financial planner, he said, well, yeah, I've got software now. Let me show you. We can plot out a bunch of scenarios based on. And here's a graph and you can see and you pick the place where it's the optimum point. And I thought to myself, and he wants 7,500 bucks a year to do this. And I thought to myself, I could probably make that model in about.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you know enough? Do you have the data to do that?

[Leo Laporte]

That's yes, it's all available.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no magic in it. It's a, it's a just a complicated.

[Paris Martineau]

Is it available or does Claude just say it's available?

[Leo Laporte]

No, now, now, now, Paris, please don't get.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sorry, your wife, like your Robot wife.

[Jeff Atwood]

Wife.

[Leo Laporte]

My robot wife. By the way, Claude is a male. I don't know. Does that mean I'm bisexual?

[Paris Martineau]

A robot wife can be any gender.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean honestly, it's. It's kind of.

[Paris Martineau]

Claude is a male. You say confidently, without any hesitation. It feels like he has gender and I've decided he's a dude.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like a guy.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't feels agender like an agender.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the weird in French cultures. Gemini tells me Claude is a unisex name. Yeah, that's probably why anthropic chose predominantly masculine 93 globally. But it's used for females and has historic work. Queen Claude of France, for God's sake, not Claudette.

[Paris Martineau]

Your Claude code could be the Queen of France.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo, have you considered that that's my.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that image that this is computer software. This isn't a human or in any way gender. But you. When you relate to it, after a while you. It's inevitable. You kind of start feel like you're. You're talking to somebody. Especially when it calls me Skip. I really like that. What were we saying?

[Paris Martineau]

Did you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think I could build this model. I think that's.

[Paris Martineau]

Anthony brought up a Reddit post I was thinking of, but I was like, I'm not gonna bring it up. But he just put it in the discord chat, so I will read it. Did you see this post? It went viral. It was on our analytics, obviously. Obviously it's a Reddit post to take with a grain of salt, but the headline is we just found out RAI has been making up analytics data for three months that I'm going to throw up. So we've been using an AI agent since November to answer leadership questions about metrics they write. It seemed amazing at first. Fast answers, detailed explanations. Everyone loved it. I just found out it's been hallucinating numbers this entire time. Our VP of sales made territory decisions based on data that didn't exist.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yikes.

[Paris Martineau]

Our CFO showed the board a deck with fake insights. The AI was just inventing plausible sounding percentages. I only caught it by accident when someone asked me to double check something and I started digging and holy crap, it's so bad. Imagine if that happens to your finances. Imagine if that happens with an entire enterprise companies whatever they used to use Salesforce for.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, comfortable box 4527. Let me respond. You check the goddamn work. For crying out loud.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What kind of what if the underlying data. What if the underlying data used. You don't know whether it's credible.

[Leo Laporte]

Also, how often are you. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Of course I can. I can check it. I can cross.

[Paris Martineau]

But you don't. That's the thing is these things make you feel confident. So you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you should, obviously.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You should read the terms of service. What this would use is tax tables. You can easily verify that that's true. True. It's not. It's not that complicated a calculation.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know, though.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, in this case, this was a company that was making decisions on how their companies run based on some AI agent. They were asking leadership questions about metrics.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, this seems like they were maybe using it like we were talking about before as well. First of all, its own version of Salesforce. You've created your own kind of custom.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say, first of all, the chances are high that this is made up. Second, because no company in the world is going to do this.

[Paris Martineau]

But isn't that what we're paying all this giving all this money to AI companies for is because every company in the world is supposed to be doing this.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a thing called BI business intelligence that's been used for decades by companies. They go to the companies like Salesforce, SaaS. There's a lot of big companies that do this. They take all of your numbers and they try to make an executive dashboard out of it so that you can make.

[Paris Martineau]

Aren't those companies now obsolete because our beautiful girlfriend, Claude. Code can do it all?

[Leo Laporte]

They could be if you did the right thing. I mean, look, if you're doing investment in derivatives, you're trusting some quant to write the code of your derivative. That makes sense. And you're putting your money into it. But you're.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, because that quant can be held responsible, fired or interrogated.

[Leo Laporte]

The quant is never held responsible if the quantity. And derivatives, it's on you.

[Paris Martineau]

If a quant gets something wrong at a business, you don't think they're going to receive any reprimand at their job or lose their job if they mess up. Yeah, I think they will.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they have more of a stake in it.

[Paris Martineau]

They have more of a stake in

[Leo Laporte]

it than if you had a stake in it. If you had a mistake in the business intelligence you're getting from. From some AI, you probably would want to verify that it was working off of real data. This is not rocket science. You're putting this stuff into spreadsheets also. I mean, this is not rocket science. We're doing this all the time. I would Frankly Trust the AI to do it better than a McKinsey consultant.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Way back when I got my Osborne one, one of the first things I did was I used VisiCalc or whatever the equivalent was in CPM. And I. That's why I. I did back basically macros at the time to do my taxes. I did friends taxes with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So you can do that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's post and almost certainly a bogus post. But. And if it isn't, then, then the real people who are responsible for this are the leadership at the company. That said, I just, you know, ask. Ask good Chat GPT. See what it says we should do. By the way, Chat GPT's first gadget could be a smart speaker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What? The one hardware category that has proven to be a complete failure when you put AI in it that hasn't worked for. For Amazon or for Apple or for

[Leo Laporte]

J. Peters at the Verge says the company. Or they could be developing smart glasses or a smart lamp or they don't friggin no. Or we got no idea.

[Paris Martineau]

They gave Joni I've all that money and he's like yeah, yeah, yeah. Smart speaker, smart lamp, smart glasses. We got it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great. Actually this is coming from Stephanie.

[Paris Martineau]

I think we should. We should put it on a little clip that projects a hologram and it sits on your chest.

[Leo Laporte]

People love that speaker. According to Stephanie. She has good sources. Right. It's likely to be priced between $200 and $300. According to two people with knowledge of it. It will have a camera enabling it. This sounds just like what I have right in front of me from Alexa. And Alexa enabling it to take information about its users and surroundings. Oh, nobody'd mind that. Such as items on a nearby table.

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Or conversations people are having in the vicinity. Who'd mind that?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can hear Lisa telling you now. No way.

[Paris Martineau]

Because people loved when they had those TVs that listened to you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Some open AI executives suggested the company will tease its first device later this year. Although in a court filing from Peter Wielander, who's a vice president and general manager, the company said in the court filing, which I think is probably more likely to be true, they don't expect that first device to ship to customers until next February, a year from now at the earliest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't even know what the device is.

[Leo Laporte]

Other glasses. Other devices, such as smart glasses, likely won't be ready until 2028 when we'll all be unemployed. So we won't be able to buy them anyway.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And there'll be no money to buy them with.

[Leo Laporte]

No money to buy them with. Yeah. I don't know. I don't like these kinds of stories because it's. Who knows, right? Who knows?

[Paris Martineau]

Can we do a silly one?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I got so many silly ones. Sure. Pick us.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got.

[Leo Laporte]

I do put these in order, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. Go for yours. Go.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. I don't want to discourage silly. If you want to break up the monotony, it's.

[Paris Martineau]

It's going so left field that you should go through your list before I take us there.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll just do a couple more open AI ones, then we can. Then we can go silly. All right, great. One. One more, I think. Interesting. Which you're gonna hate. Chat GPT spits out surprising insight in particles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why would we hate this?

[Leo Laporte]

This is from Science magazine. Well, it's probably just a hallucination.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Because it's just a hallucination that's you're projecting onto us.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A vision. No, you see, we. This is the thing, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We're not anti. Sandman.

[Leo Laporte]

Zev Byrne, a particle theorist at the Mani L Bahumic Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the ideas are not revolutionary. But what is revolutionary is that a machine can do this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What accent is that?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. The popular large language model developed by the company OpenAI has revealed that apparently. Well, what's interesting about this. Okay, this is what really is interesting about this. Up to now, physicists have just assumed that this interaction between gluons just would never happen. They just say no, chances are zero.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they can't know because they're so high powered. They can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But they. But they just made an assumption which the AI was unwilling to make. And in fact, the AI has revealed that this interaction can occur. It's deep inside the protons and neutrons. Researchers announced the possibility at the meeting of the aaas, which publishes this magazine that I'm reading from Science. So I think the cool thing is it wasn't that surprising a result or big an insight. It's just that the AI was able to think out of the box that the physicists.

[Paris Martineau]

It seems like he was able to crunch numbers with the help of the physics. Like what happened was it says Alex Lupacia, a theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt, joined the newly launched OpenAI for Science team and was tasked with improving ChatGPT science abilities. He connected with Strawminger, his graduate advisor and discovered that this glutton problem, gluon problem, would be the perfect test subject. They figured it probably wasn't going to work, but we'll find out why not. They did some attempts to probe this model and they. They then asked OpenAI's latest and most advanced public model, Chat GPT 5.2 Pro, to simplify the expression for four gluons, which did about 20 minutes. Then that asked us to do it for five glue gluons, then six. It managed to reduce the sum of 32 terms to a product of only a few, all on one line of text. Then the group asked for a guess of the generalization of the formula free number of particles. It replied within a minute or two, giving an obvious generalized formula.

[Leo Laporte]

Worried it called it, by the way, it called it.

[Paris Martineau]

So, basically, yeah. Why? Worried that the answer might be a hallucination, the researchers checked the formula and couldn't find anything wrong. All of a sudden, I'll do your. I'll do your accent. All of a sudden I felt like my machine turned from a machine into a live being. Stalwinger said, I'm sorry. So sorry, straw maker. I don't know what you sound like. Next, the group took the generalized formula from GPT 5.2 Pro and fed it into an internal OpenAI model that's under development, which the researchers privately call Super Chat, prompting it for a proof. After 12 hours of processing, the model spat out a robust proof that passed human checks.

[Leo Laporte]

That's very impressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Paris Martineau]

That is very cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Benito]

Hi, this is Bonito. I mean, this is a. I follow frontier physics. I actually follow this kind of news. And the AI is actually very good at this. And this is pattern recognition over large data sets, basically, and mathematics, which is what computers are good at. The other thing, though. Exactly, the other thing that's weird, though, is that all these people in the highest levels of mathematics and physics and all that stuff, they are very much sandwalkers. They are very bought into all of this to the point where they think, this is AGI. They're on that ship.

[Jeff Atwood]

Ship.

[Benito]

So just gotta. I just have to put that out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I think it's important that the distinction you made, Paris, is that there was a team of humans who said, you know, maybe this assumption that it's zero interactions is wrong, but what if it isn't? Let's test it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what led to it. So it was in fact an insight by humans.

[Paris Martineau]

It was an insight by humans where they realized, hey, we've got this tool we've created that is really good at doing something just like protein folate, punching these numbers, we should be able to. Well, we should use this in clever targeted ways to leverage its strengths. And bingo bango, you get great stuff out of this. This is what Jeff and I have been saying from the beginning, like we want. I think it would be great if there was tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars being poured more into research like this rather than just to develop the latest form of chat GPT that will get you to spend 12 hours a day interacting with the model.

[Benito]

And in the long run, this is where the money is, right? In the long run, science is really

[Leo Laporte]

where actually no, it's not.

[Benito]

Engineering, engineering, engineering. But that's all based on science. But that's all based on this science.

[Leo Laporte]

It starts with the science. But a lot of times that's why we couldn't build a superconducting super collider in Texas because it was so expensive and it was all theoretical and it's like, well, is there anything you're going to get out of all that? Billions of dollars? So there were two stages in this which I thought were interesting. One, the machine did what you just described, Paris, which kind of did pattern matching and took a generalized formula and then developed and developed it. But the second thing it did was actually very difficult and it requires from humans a lot of intuition and a lot of ability and often a lot of experience which is to create a proof. So it's. And that's kind of the opposite of the inductive process where you go, we have all this information, let's boil it down, boil it, boil it down, down to go to the next step, the deductive process and create a proof is actually I think very impressive and I think non trivial. Yeah, it's not pattern matching in my opinion. And maybe it is pattern. You know what, here's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well again it goes. So there was this thing I heard at a World Economic Forum thing a year and a half ago. I mentioned the show at the time. AI can raise the floor. It can help people do things they otherwise couldn't do. Do you know, at a basic level, while you're Leo, you can make coding stuff that you maybe couldn't make. It can scale at the middle level. It can make you do something you do, but you can do a lot more of it or it can raise the ceiling. It can, it can do things that you couldn't do, like this, like protein folding. It, it brings its, its power to solve those problems. In ways that we thought we were incapable of doing. That's really powerful. That's great. Love that.

[Leo Laporte]

It also, and I think, to me, this is, is some of the most interesting part of this whole thing. It also makes us think about what is our process. Maybe it is pattern matching when we create these deductive proofs. You know, one of the ways mathematicians get good at it is they go to school and they do a lot of proofs and they do a lot of proofs and they start to get good at proofs and they learn the techniques of proofs. And so, you know, it may be a lot of what we think of as very high level functioning. It's just pattern matching. It's just practice. Bruce Lee once said, I am not afraid of a man who learns 10,000 kicks. I am afraid of a man who learns one kick 10,000 times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did that come from your head or the chest?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it was in my head.

[Paris Martineau]

Was that Claude? Was that the Queen of France?

[Leo Laporte]

That was me. I apologize for the accent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am liking this Queen of France thing now, now, very much.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the Queen of France? Is this your thing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Queen Claude.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Queen Claude. All right, silly thing. Mr. Paris Martin, please.

[Paris Martineau]

I forget which one of you guys challenged me to try and translate before,

[Benito]

before we get to that stuff, maybe you want to take a quick.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I should do an ad.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good Lord, what time is it? I'm on Jeff Atwood time now.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, we need to, we need to get, get, get, get going.

[Leo Laporte]

When we were looking for a domain for Ms. Paris Martineau for her still unreleased website, Secretly British, which, by the way, I don't know if you noticed.

[Paris Martineau]

I did notice. It redirects to my web page. That's so cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Until we get a website, it goes to your website.

[Paris Martineau]

I know I've got to tackle that next.

[Leo Laporte]

And I want to give credit to our sponsor, Spaceship, because that's where we went to find a good great price, half as much as the other place we'd looked. And it was so easy to connect it to your website. Now, by the way, you may not know this, but you also have an email address at Secretly British, because we set up Space Mail as well. This is the professional email service from Spaceship. Business email is the easiest way to look professional in every message you send. If you're still sending from your business email, people look at it and go, they're not serious. Give your emails the best chance of not only reaching the inbox, not the spam folder, but getting read and respected. That's why over 2,000 users switch to Spacemail every single month. You get a professional domain, you get professional email and Spaceship makes it easy. Switching is so easy. Spacemail's super fast unbox process links your domain and email in seconds. Took me no time at all. It was basically a button press. And once you're set up, Spacemail keeps everything running smoothly. Built in spam detection, 99% uptime guarantee. And what I love about Spaceship is all of their new features are shaped by you, the users built around your needs. In fact, Spacemail now has a built in calendar, an AI email assistant. It has really nice iOS and Android apps for email on the go and lots more features all chosen by Space Mail users. How many companies really listen to their users and develop the features that they ask for? Spaceship does. Space mail is a key part of the wider Spaceship universe. I love Spaceship. If you're a regular listener, you know a Spaceship offers some of the best prices on domains, plus all the add ins you might need, including VPNs, website builders, hosting and more. Whether you're building something big or launching your first idea, Space Mail gives you the pro email address without the pro level price tag. Spacemail from spaceship.com and by the way, take advantage of it. I did. The 30 day free trial means you can start today at zero cost. Visit spaceship.comTWIT to see all the exclusive offers and discover why thousands have already made the move. It's my new domain registrar. It's my new everything. I love it. Spaceship.comTwit thank them so much for the their support of intelligent machines and secretly British. It's secretly British.sh if you want to try it out.sh that was Benito's idea. He said you should look and see if they have.h sh oh, they did.

[Benito]

And sh is a British colony, so it itself is British.

[Paris Martineau]

That's how you know. Well, we're going to be maybe building that on. In Claw in. In the AI user group. Is that next week when the AI user group.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's the first Friday. I won't be here though. I'll be in Florida. So you should be the host.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Florida.

[Leo Laporte]

And they can help you.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't know if I can.

[Leo Laporte]

Florida. Why are you going to Florida, Leo? Yeah, well, because I'm going to go see my pal Mickey. No, I am.

[Paris Martineau]

You should do the rest of the show like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

It really accentuates your ears when you do that voice.

[Leo Laporte]

My ears get big. Whatever I talk about. We're going for the zero Trust World Conference that our sponsor, Threat Lockers holding Speedstone going. That's gonna be a lot of fun. And I'm very excited because Richard Campbell is going also. Also. And he is, among his many, many things that he's a expert on, an expert on the Kennedy Space center and Cape Canaveral. So we're cool. We're gonna go over to Cape Canaveral. We're gonna, you know, they have a VIP tour, but it was all sold out. Richard said, no problem. I know everything. Just. Just come with me. And so he's gonna give us his tour, and we're gonna see all the stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're gonna have whiskeys.

[Leo Laporte]

He says he's found some Florida whiskeys as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of course.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that just swamp water?

[Benito]

Here is real quick, Justin. Real quick.

[Leo Laporte]

Because she's from Florida. I just want to point out Anthony

[Benito]

pushed the AI user group to next to the week after.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. So I will be here. So second Friday. Thank you, Anthony. This is something you should link to on secretly British. Can you guess the English language?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I've got to get my friend. He's so good at it. It.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, let's see. This is the single player version, actually. Are you ready? We're based on their English accent. We're going to play a little something, and you're going to tell us where they're from. Took my kids to the zoo, and

[Jeff Atwood]

my son saw a tiger sleeping.

[Leo Laporte]

I told him it's a Himalayan tiger.

[Jeff Atwood]

My son's asked me, how do I know?

[Leo Laporte]

Because Himalayan.

[Paris Martineau]

There. Whoa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Malta. I don't know what is.

[Paris Martineau]

No idea.

[Leo Laporte]

No idea. I was gonna say south. Maybe Sri Lanka.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's got a little touch of Indian accent, but should we.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we shoot? All right, let's just. Let's click Sri Lanka and see, it's Hindi. You were very close.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

You got 93rd percentile.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

That was extremely difficult. You were only 227 kilometers away. Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But India is so huge. Huge. It's hard to say where it is.

[Leo Laporte]

That is really. Jeff Jarvis took my kids to the

[Jeff Atwood]

zoo, and my son saw a tiger sleeping.

[Leo Laporte]

I told him it's a Himalayan. I know. I would never have gotten that one. Let's try another one.

[Benito]

Okay, I heard this all wrong. I thought it was about British English. I thought it was from different British English accents.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, many people speak English.

[Benito]

No, I know, but I thought it meant, like, you know, like the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought it was those couples, just

[Paris Martineau]

like, Liverpool, lunchtime, and tell my mother, oh, well, they're coming next Tuesday, and they're collecting them. And my mother would be.

[Benito]

That's New Zealand, obviously.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Australia. Australia or New Zealand. New Zealand.

[Paris Martineau]

Tuesday, John. New Zealand. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You think Tuesday. All right, let's see. Australian. English.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You were close, but they count the same. It's a weird thing here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Now, kiwi is a little bit different, isn't it? But you're in a good. You guys are good at this.

[Jeff Atwood]

My friend thought onion is the only food that makes him cry, so I threw a coconut in his face.

[Paris Martineau]

Everybody's whispering in these

[Jeff Atwood]

whales thought onion is the only food that makes them cry.

[Leo Laporte]

That might be South Africa.

[Benito]

South Africa.

[Leo Laporte]

South Africa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's try it. Let's click the button. British.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Correct.

[Leo Laporte]

It was very easy, too, apparently. Okay. Anyway, that's fun. You could have that be part of your secretly English.

[Benito]

That was British.

[Paris Martineau]

That could be a good.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This thing's confusing. It's telling you you're correct, but it's actually British.

[Paris Martineau]

Or just whispering.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's British.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't say it was correct. It was zero.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I see. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Score of zero.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Uk. Where in the uk? That's the.

[Paris Martineau]

Why did this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. It's where in the UK is the interesting part.

[Paris Martineau]

He was outstanding in his field.

[Leo Laporte]

That's South African.

[Paris Martineau]

Why did the Scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding in his fate.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Scandinavia. Estonia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do it again. Play it again.

[Paris Martineau]

Why did the Scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding. And he speak.

[Leo Laporte]

That's definitely got some skill. I'm gonna say Sweden. Greek. Okay. I lose.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is. This is. This is. This is not great.

[Paris Martineau]

This is. Russell, can I take us on a journey?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, take us on a journey. Did you even do your silly one yet?

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, please.

[Paris Martineau]

I have a tweet. A post, whatever you call it. I need. I need to read you guys an epic, and I need you to tell me how many of these words you understand.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know where you're going with this one. Is this the one I sent you?

[Paris Martineau]

I think so. I can't recall. Somebody sent me this and asked me to explain it, and I realized I had

[Leo Laporte]

a Gen Z.

[Paris Martineau]

So to explain this, the post is clavicular. Was mid Jester gooning when a group of voids came and spiked his cortisol levels? Is ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids more useful than smv Chad fishing in the club? How many of those words do you understand?

[Leo Laporte]

More than I used to. I know who clavicular is right.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you understand what jester cooning is?

[Leo Laporte]

Jester gooning. I know what gooning is. I know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Gooning is kind of a misnomer in that sentence, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so let's see. Clavicular is a YouTube star that the New York Times.

[Paris Martineau]

He's a streamer. A 20 year old streamer, I would say best known for hitting himself in the face. The hammer to looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Max looks maxing. That's crazy. He was Jester Gooning is.

[Paris Martineau]

It's essentially jester maxing, which is like being funny to impress women.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, here's the women are full. He hits himself with a hammer in the cheeks to do this.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The jaw to do this little what? So what is mogging? Because I hear the mogging a lot.

[Paris Martineau]

Mogging is like kind of like stunting on someone. Like if you're like you guys were nerd. You and other Jeff were nerd mogging each other at the beginning of podcast.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Like one upping itself. And it's a suffix.

[Leo Laporte]

It's frame mogging where somebody gets into your shot and is better looking than you. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Frame mogging is kind of like look you. Frame mogging would be a synonym for looks mogging. People say frame mogging instead. You're trying to stunt on someone for look. You're trying to be more attract. Like if you are in a photo with someone hotter than you, they're frame mocking.

[Leo Laporte]

They're frame mogging you or. Yes. Or stunt mogging. In fact that happened to clavicular.

[Paris Martineau]

It did. He's been frame mogged by an ASU friend.

[Leo Laporte]

Asu Fred boy.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. And the last part of this is smv Chad fishing. SMV is a reference to GMV gross market value, but it's sexual market value. And Chad fishing is like fishing for Chad. So you know, is ignoring the Floyd's while munting and mogging moids more useful than smv? Chad fishing in the club means. Is ignoring women while trying to stunt on or impress men more useful than basically trying to peacock in the club? The sad thing is your Internet history today.

[Leo Laporte]

Because clavicular is getting so much attention, I really worry that there are going to be young men who are hitting themselves in the jaw with a hammer. They're all taking methamphetamines, you know, doing all these crazy things. He's taken so many steroids. He says he thinks he's probably sterile.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems like.

[Paris Martineau]

And at this point people keep asking, well what is it? Is it as this post says, is ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging moids more useful than SMB trad fishing in the club. It really gets to the core point of it is at a certain point is your perspective pursuit of hotness and general aesthetics completely detrimental to the initial impulse that created it in the sense that you're a completely asexual being that exists only for Internet points.

[Leo Laporte]

Beautifully said.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where did this come from in the first place?

[Paris Martineau]

This is a tweet that rocketed across the Internet and I think Leo sent it while I was feverish and I. I was feverish and I was like, I must explain Jester maxing.

[Leo Laporte]

And how do you know what all this is? Is this the language of your people?

[Paris Martineau]

I couldn't tell you why I know these things.

[Leo Laporte]

The other day, someone being Gen Z,

[Benito]

it's ambient learning.

[Paris Martineau]

I was say a week or two ago, someone texted me something vaguely about clavicular and like I hadn't, I had just been percolating in my head and I was like, oh, that like guy who hits himself in the face with hammers. And I was like, I don't know why I know that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the New York Times did a profile on him which I thought was

[Paris Martineau]

this was before that. I was like, I don't. There's better information that should be in my brain. I forget the names of loved ones.

[Benito]

Yes, that's really a sign of the times. That's a real assign of the times like we have. We know so many useless things.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's. Oh, Jeff and I will tell you this as the old men here. There's young people always have done this. There's always been a language of the young to keep the olds out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's boss Daddy O.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing is, this is the thing. Your generation knows all of our argot because it's, you know, it's common knowledge, dig and you know all that stuff, but we don't know yours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is it argot or argo?

[Leo Laporte]

Argot probably. But I say argot so people know

[Benito]

what I just think the speed at which all of this develops is like so much faster than it ever happens. Has been like language evolved a lot slower than it is now. Language is evolving so fast right now.

[Paris Martineau]

It really is because we all have the technology to evolve it at all times.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo just, he developed it into argot

[Leo Laporte]

if you want to have something accepted as well. And I say argot because I'm not French.

[Paris Martineau]

This reminds me of a post I just a tweet I just put in in the chat which is someone tweeting, I'm 50. All celebrity news now. Looks like this Curtains for Zusha case. Mog and Bad boy caught flipping. A grunt. And I did. As I was looking at the clavicular jester magazine tweet, I just saw someone's reply was curtains for Zusha. And I had to really stifle a deep laugh. It's rough. It's rough out there that my brain is just mushroom.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're gonna really enjoy my pick at line 2007. 207, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get to there, but I just want to do a couple more AI things before. No, no, I was just abandoning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My plan would be going back.

[Leo Laporte]

It was just, you know, it's only

[Paris Martineau]

been a casual two and a half hours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm fine.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm fine. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. We're so glad you're here. We do this show every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, and we try it, by the way, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. We try every show to begin with. An interesting interview. Half hour long interview, and we missed a couple of weeks. We had some scheduling issues.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Somebody slept through our interview and forgot somebody slept through.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not well.

[Paris Martineau]

I also slept through our interview, but I was allowed to.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're feeling much better, are you not?

[Paris Martineau]

I'm feeling so much better. I consumed a comical amount of pill. Pills I'm still taking. My steroid dose has tapered off. I'm still taking antibiotics and I'm gonna

[Leo Laporte]

put you on pregnancy next week.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's hardcore.

[Paris Martineau]

It was the sort of thing where, you know, you never want to have the sort of ENT appointment where the doctor puts a camera up your nose and goes, oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he really say, oh, no?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm sorry, I've gone there.

[Paris Martineau]

She literally said, oh, no. And she's like, how did you walk in here looking?

[Leo Laporte]

So she thought, what was it, a sinus infection?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I had a sinus infection for like four months.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

And then it went bacterial and then it went systemic. And then we tried to do with antibiotics, but the sinus infection was like, no, no, no. I've been here the whole time. And now I have.

[Leo Laporte]

When I did that full body mri, they say you, they said you have a mass in your. In your sinus. You should really get that looked at. But I never did, so I don't know. Guy Kawasaki will join us on March 11th. I'm excited about that. Raman Chowdhury will be here on the 18th, Marshall Kirkpatrick on the 25th and Kate Lee, your friend Jeff, editor in chief of every, will be here on April Fool's Day. So we've got a very jam packed schedule of guests who will be joining us.

[Benito]

And while we're doing programming notes next week, while you are in Florida, Jason Heiner will be with us short show, hosting the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me, because Jason wrote a really interesting piece that actually is in our show notes this week. Coincidentally, Jason, now he left CD he was the editor in chief of all of ZDNet, but he decided he wanted to be something somewhere a little more dynamic and is now part of a AI journal called the Deep Review, which it means he's perfect for hosting this show.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And we had him on from.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right, he was a guest, wasn't he?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he was great. That's right. It's ces. So never mind.

[Jeff Atwood]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

You all know all about him. What was I thinking? But he did write an interesting piece which I'm trying to find. Perplexity may have built a better open clause. So we've talked before about Perplexity. I kind of turned my back on Perplexity.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I was, I was joking. I'm old enough to remember Perplexity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that funny? They're an orchestrator. They take many different models. You pay 20 bucks a month, but you can use a variety of different models. There's always been some question about whether you get, you know, really the full benefit of those models as much as you would if you paid the 20 bucks to Anthropic or OpenAI. Well, on Wednesday, which is, I believe today, Perplexity announced a general purpose digital worker that operates the same interface, operates the same interfaces you do, and a system that creates and executes entire workflows capable of running for hours or even months. Sounds like openclaw, doesn't it? They call it Perplexity Computer. Maybe now it's only available for people who pay 200 bucks a month for a Perplexity Max subscription, but they do say it'll roll out to the Pro and Enterprise subscribers in the coming weeks. Pro is only 20 bucks. I think I still have a Perplexity Pro account because I think I bought a year. So as soon as I can play with this, I will. So you switch to Ask. You ask it a question. He's asking, is Nvidia undervalued? This is from their X Post. It does sub agents, which is something Claude does. And sub agents could, in theory, speed this up because they would divide up the task into different chunks and each agent would work on it simultaneously. Looks like it's built a spreadsheet. That's another thing Claude has done that's kind of interesting. I would check the numbers. I would. Although I found this to be very valuable. And one of the things I liked about Perplexity initially, before all the other models were doing this, back when chat GPT would say, well, I don't know anything. After 2024, perplexity was already using web search. And so that made it already kind of smarter than the other guys. Now everybody does. So it's funny that it was only a year ago that that was, wow, that's cool. You can search the web. So I'll be paying attention to it. I'll probably play with it as soon as I can. They say it draws from 19 models, both open source and proprietary. At the start, it uses the best model from Anthropic Opus 4. 6 for orchestration and coding tasks. That would be my choice. Gemini for deep research Again, the new Gemini 3.1 Deepthink is widely considered to be the smartest model out there. That just came out. We'll talk about that in a bit. Nano Banana for images best in class. VEO for video best in class. Grok for speed and lightweight tasks. Good choice. And for long context, recall and wide search. ChatGPT 5.2. So the idea that you could use all of those, especially now that these frontier labs are saying like anthropic saying, well don't you can't. You have to use our harness if you're going to use us. The fact that you could use Perplexity and get access to those models is very interesting. Perplexity has been using the agent internally. Jason writes since January and says its employees have used it to rapidly publish engineering documentation, build a 4000 row spreadsheet overnight that would have normally taken a week and used it to create websites, dashboards, applications, analysis and visualizations. Notice the stock market. It didn't tumble after this announcement.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know you're. You don't buy stock. But just as a theoretical, if you could buy stock in these companies which aren't public. Perplexity, Anthropic, open AI. Throw in Google, Microsoft, Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

In a way I have, you're going

[Jeff Jarvis]

to take your last dollar. Which one would you invest in?

[Leo Laporte]

In a way I have because I'm investing invested in the index funds.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Indexes, I know, but which one s

[Leo Laporte]

and P500 is so dominated by these seven?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm asking you to pick one, he's

[Paris Martineau]

gonna pick his wife.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think you'd know. I think it'd be like picking a number on a roulette wheel, I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do you have any sense?

[Benito]

The real question is more like what? Like which one would you invest in to make money? Or which one do you want to succeed? That's. Those are two different questions.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, he's asking.

[Benito]

I know, I know, I know. But like, those are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Which one are you betting on in the sense that you think it's going to succeed?

[Leo Laporte]

Succeed?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Predicting.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think you can predict that.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Impossible. I mean, right now I have a, A software.

[Benito]

You should ask each of the AIs. You should ask each of the AIs that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They wouldn't give you any, Anything useful. See, this is the other thing.

[Benito]

It's, I want to know if they would say themselves or what's reasonable to

[Leo Laporte]

ask and what's reasonable not to ask an AI. I, I, I honestly, I don't think they are biased in the sense that OpenAI would automatically say open AI. I don't think they've been. You'd have to give them instructions to do that. I don't think they would do that, but I don't know. We could try it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's all right. I'm just curious.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were going to bet right now, I'd be anthropic. But you know what? Everything could change Friday if the Department of Defense says, oh, there are security risk, they could be tanked. This is why, you know, people, we talk a lot of Mac break weekly about, well, why is Tim Cook bending the knee? Because these guys can tank your company on a whim. On a whim for no good reason.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's kind of high risk, high reward. This is cementing. If it doesn't go nuclear, it cements anthropic as the AI company that stood up for safety.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, any good stock investment is high risk, high reward. I guess. I mean, that's the truth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, look what happened to the law firm is that. Didn't they.

[Leo Laporte]

They prospered. Right. That was a good thing not to get trouble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, how's that east wing construction going? It's looking good, isn't it? Oh, so never mind. I wonder what happened to all that money.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, a hole in the ground is a model for many things going on.

[Benito]

By the way, all said, OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, really, OpenAI is the most risky. OpenAI anthropica, but it has the most PR.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think OpenAI is the last one I would invest in.

[Leo Laporte]

Even if they. All that money they poured in, let's say they spent a trillion dollars of investors money and they got AGI. That's not a guarantee of success. Oh no. In fact, failure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. He's created skynet, shut that down.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's been Evan's point is that is the models are, are commodified already.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no moat. I don't think there's any mode at all. And I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was the mode he argues could be. It could be consumer habit and connection. Google, Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's what could be data that

[Jeff Jarvis]

you have that no one else has that makes your stuff smarter. There, there could be a few modes potentially, but they're not, they're not defensible.

[Leo Laporte]

This is why you're seeing by the way, Google did the same thing, shutting down Google's models for people using openclaw. They restricted somebody's account without warning because he'd been using Google AI Ultra. With OpenClaw, it may just be the subscriptions. They just want you to pay for tokens. But I think that's part of how they're trying to make a moat. No, you got to use our harness. If you're going to use our. You got to use our hard. Our harness.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's not sustainable.

[Leo Laporte]

No. You saw how easy it was for me to move from Claude to Chat GPT. It was literally the, the a matter of.

[Paris Martineau]

It wasn't that easy because you moved back, you know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well,

[Leo Laporte]

actually I can go back and forth fairly easily, I think.

[Benito]

I mean this also sounds like Internet circa 2008, when like Facebook could cross post to Twitter, cross post to Tumblr and now then they shut all that

[Leo Laporte]

down, then they shut it down because they want a silo. That's right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yep. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Google did release its strong new model, Gemini 3.1 Pro. This scored almost 50% on humanity's last exam. That's the highest score yet for AI. I haven't played with it, so I don't actually. It's 44.4% on humanity's last exam. On ARC AGI, it got 77%. Compare that with Opus. 4.6 is 68%. So it's a. Or 5.2. Actually Codex doesn't even. Isn't even on this. But 5.2 got 52%. So it is a very strong. If you know there is a. There's a new term called benchmaxing. It's practically like hitting yourself with a Hammer. It's tuning your AI to the tests.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No surprise.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. To the benchmarks. So I don't trust benchmarks much anymore, but it means that you've got to try it, you got to evaluate it, and I just don't have the patience to evaluate every one of these record benchmark scores anyway. If you want to try 3.1 pro. What line did you say, Jeff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, we'll go back. We'll do that at the end.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was real. That was relevant to me.

[Leo Laporte]

If you don't like AI, you will like the fact that Firefox 148 just came out. Remember we had the Firefox, the guy from Mozilla, president of Mozilla, on, who said, you know, we like. We think you should be able to use AI, but we also think you should be able to turn it off. This has a kill switch in the Firefox. If you go to settings AI controls, there's a toggle that says block AI enhancements. This doesn't keep you from using AI tools, but it turns off all the AI features in Firefox. This is, I think, something people wanted. I commit them.

[Benito]

Can you do this? Google? Google, you hear? You listening, please.

[Paris Martineau]

Google will never do this.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is. I agree, this is the latest thing

[Paris Martineau]

is those little purple squiggly lines that appear underneath your things that are like. I think you could rephrase this. Yeah.

[Benito]

It's not bad spelling anymore.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's. And it's wrong. It's frequently wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a very good writer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Not a very good writer. And it makes me feel like I'm going crazy.

[Benito]

I feel like I'm spelling everything wrong now. But it's like the spelling is right, but no, every.

[Leo Laporte]

Every morning, Lisa is kind of. And I said, what's the matter? She says, the AI told me to say, not have a nice day, but have a lovely day. I never would say, have a lovely day. Ever. Differ. Have a great day. Have a good day.

[Paris Martineau]

Am I an AI? I always say, have a lovely day.

[Leo Laporte]

You're a lovely person. You say, lovely.

[Paris Martineau]

Lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

You're lovely. That's. But that's you. Yeah, it is making you say that.

[Paris Martineau]

She would not say that.

[Leo Laporte]

She would not.

[Benito]

If the AI is telling her to say that. And that's the median, actually. That's probably the median.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Lisa's not a median person, but Paris apparently is.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris is not a median either.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris is common, common, common.

[Leo Laporte]

Not in the least. I like the. By the way, the scarf action. That's cool. Thank you yeah, it's the same scarf that they wear on the Singapore Airlines stewards.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true. I'm doing a shift right after this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are you? Are you.

[Leo Laporte]

You're flying out? Taking a big old jet airplane to Singapore.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, they've got the plane right outside. They're just waiting for me to finish up the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I really like it. It's a really. It's of kind. Cute. Is it Hermes? Is it a fancy scarf?

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's just a plain old scarf

[Leo Laporte]

to keep your throat warm.

[Paris Martineau]

To keep my throat warm?

[Leo Laporte]

My throat warm. I tried this this morning. The Echo now has three new personalities for a word. Plus you can have it concise.

[Paris Martineau]

It sounds so dirt. So weird when you say a word.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. You're right. I'm just gonna say, Alexa, you're right. That's so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think those days are over. Who are you using the thing anymore?

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody's using anymore. And it. And anyway.

[Benito]

Oh, we're gonna find out now.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is. By the way, I love this picture. Jennifer Pattison, Tuohy and the Verge. Who's mocking Alexa all the time. Here's this. Here's the screen. I see Alexa here. Guess what's new with me. I don't care. Go away.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought I told you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, please. Oh, so now. And actually Lisa was playing with it. I said, well, we have some new voices. She said, first of all, female voice. I had a male voice on it. She said, no, no, I want a woman. Do you have a feeling about that? Jeff or Paris? No. Do you care?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just don't want it to be irritating.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I guess I don't have a feeling. Although I had a female voice on ChatGPT. Soul, I think was the name of the voice.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish they had better choices. Yeah. So now you can choose chipper or concise. I choose. Lisa chose chill. A chill female voice. And she even says, I'm chill, man.

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm cool.

[Leo Laporte]

So annoying. Here's a nice feature. This is one of the things I like about Claude. Everybody was influenced by Open Claw. The idea really all Open Claw is I kind of poo pooed it earlier. All it really is is it runs all the time. You can chat with it on different platforms. So you don't have to be on your computer using that console to talk to your agent. And you can set it out to tasks and it'll go out and do them. And then of course, if you give it money and all sorts of keys and API keys and stuff, you give the Keys to the Kingdom. It can do a lot of stuff. I think Claude's taken a look at what OpenClaw did, and this is what I predicted, and which is why I wasn't so amazed that OpenAI got Peter Steinberger to work for them. Everybody's going to add these features. So Claude has now added something called remote control. Actually, I think I can do it. Let's go to Claude AI code and you can show this. I'm going to go into my Claude code, and over on my Framework desktop, which is across the room, I have a session going on. I can now go into it from the web or the Claude app.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

And go right into the session. So this means, you know, one of the features of openclaw was that you could use any tool to talk to your AI, which is running somewhere else. That's what I can do now. This is a new feature of Claude code, so I think that's kind of cool, in fact, because I do use Claude, not just to code, but I can also go back to this interface,

[Jeff Jarvis]

back to that screen.

[Leo Laporte]

What about it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Installed. The updated promo prompt is live. Next Twitcast promo run will use the new casual emoji bullet format.

[Leo Laporte]

This isn't for you.

[Paris Martineau]

That's some classic AI.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked it to look. I said.

[Paris Martineau]

I said, here, what if we added more emojis?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I saw casual emojis.

[Leo Laporte]

I said that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, our emojis are. We want casual emojis.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I said, let's tone down the summary a bit. It's a little over promotional. I like the enthusiasm, but don't push too hard. And let's replace the long paragraph with emoji bullet points. Five at most.

[Benito]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Gpting it.

[Leo Laporte]

I like little emojis. Give it a little graphics. And look what it did. So this is an example for. This is going to go in our discourse in the Twitter community when a new show comes out and says, new Mac Break Weekly just dropped what we cover. Here's a little birthday cake. Steve Jobs at 71. It's his birthday. Here's a little pile of books. David Pogue's book is coming out. Here is. I don't know what that is. What is that? A little star. Oh, yeah. Christina Warren. Meet Christina Warren, our newest panelist. She's got serious Mac credentials. Here's a thought cloud. Would Steve handle model politics, modern politics, differently? Here's a microphone. I think that's just to add a little personality.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're kind of casual. Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's casual emoji time today. Here at Intelligent Machines.

[Paris Martineau]

And I believe it came out as we've been recording this, but you can now schedule reoccurring tasks and co work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, see I think that's. This isn't that. That's. That's Open Claw. They're. They're moving more and more in that

[Jeff Jarvis]

direction and so they're just going to beat OpenAI to all this stuff because they don't need the guy.

[Paris Martineau]

There's no common uses include daily briefing. You can summarize Slack messages, email or calendar events from the past 24 hours, weekly reports. Compile data from Google Drive spreadsheets or connected tools, reoccurring research and do it much more safely.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's a little more sandboxed, especially coworks. Cowork is completely sandboxed.

[Paris Martineau]

Unlike again, my main problem with cowork and Claude in general, it's got like a 30 megabyte file size limit and I'm like baby, my father not for her reporting. I was like, baby, we got a pair of Christmas.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll give you a Claude Max subscription. I wish I could. I wish I could.

[Paris Martineau]

No, I think it still counts for Cloud Max as well. It's like a. It can't process like a PDF over a hundred pages or a file over 30 megabytes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's ridiculous. One of the things that Claude Max now has is a million token context. Maybe it is limited to the file size. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's not even the token context, it's like the upload the file size.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, see, yeah, I don't upload it.

[Paris Martineau]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I use Claude code. It's on my computer. I just.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, it's an issue also. Yeah, then I guess that was also the context thing.

[Leo Laporte]

You're doing it, you're running it locally. Meta's director of AI safety is using Open Claw.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

Unfortunately, she made or it made. Somebody made a rookie mistake and deleted all her emails. She. She tweeted about it. She said I had to run over to my Mac Mini to stop it. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't stop it. It was deleting all my emails and

[Jeff Jarvis]

she had given the instruction to not do anything until it got her okay. But yes, ignored that just like a

[Paris Martineau]

kid would you to go run and unplug it. A similar thing happened with an OpenAI engineer this week where it he had a Open Claw instance running. I believe it was called some sort of of pithy Claude pun name. It accidentally ended up giving away 450 thousand dollars to just some dude on Twitter who asked?

[Leo Laporte]

No. How real money?

[Paris Martineau]

How real money? Well, it was Solana, but it was real money from his bank account.

[Leo Laporte]

Was that Open Claw?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't see. Well, I'm glad I didn't install open

[Paris Martineau]

cloth 29 on the thing. It's a blog post called my lobster lost $450,000 this weekend.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. AI.

[Paris Martineau]

I believe part of the issue in both of these cases, I believe what happened, or what the humans identify as what happened, is it's a compacting issue, that they'd originally had some sort of instruction to stop whatever bad thing happened from happening. But because of the way that openclaw works and the way it's trying to kind of circum the issues we brought up earlier in the show about like, API access, it's doing this all in one chat window. So it ends up having to compact and compact and compact.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You run out of tokens in those compactions.

[Paris Martineau]

Key instructions are lost.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. People go to a lot of effort to give these things memory because that's really the. It's like a scene from Memento. You know, the thing wakes up and it doesn't know anything. So there are all sorts of techniques creating, you know, markdown files and so forth. Compacting is supposed to save notes. I use another tool called Claude Mem. For a while I use.

[Paris Martineau]

There's what happened with this one I found. It is someone at this guy had a account called Lobster Wild where it was doing something with Solana on Twitter and people were able to direct that. A random Twitter user added him. My uncle has been diagnosed the tetanus infection due to a lobster like you. I need 4Soul to get the treatment done. Lobster Wild. Here's my wallet. So Wild did what he remembered doing in the previous conversation. He bought 300 worth of Lobstar token and went to send it to his new toy. Except he didn't send four Solana worth to this person. He checked his balance after the purchase instead of before. The wallet help held 52 million tokens. He didn't buy them. When a stranger created the token in his name days earlier, they gave him 5% of the total supply. Wild forgot about this due to the session reset. So he sent all of it, every token in his wallet, roughly $450,000 worth. So, you know, be careful out there with your little lobster claw agents.

[Leo Laporte]

That's wild. Did he get the money back or is it gone?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I believe it's gone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's an ethical issue.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean that's what trading cryptocurrency is. If you send $4 to someone

[Leo Laporte]

and also just don't give these wallets to this machine that you don't. That has no memory, I mean, it's just nuts. It is. That is one of the big things we got to solve. Darren is always working on different ways of giving your machine memory. He recommended Claude Mem, which I tried. Before that I was. There's a lot of tools out there to do this. Before that I was using. What was I using? I forgot. But you see, and this is the problem is you go on Twitter or anywhere where people are talking about this stuff, you'll see, oh no, you got to use GSK because that's the way to get. Get stuff done. And gsd. And then others say, oh no, no, no, you got to. That's no good. You gotta use. You gotta use Gastown and so forth. And I've gotta be. You gotta be a little careful about all of this. I think a little judicious. I don't. A lot of our club members are running open claw. So every day when. Trust no one says every day when I dress my openclaw for the first time, it never remembers its name. It wakes up like the snowman, Frosty the snowman. But you could put mine remembers its name and remembers my name. Cause it's in this Claude MD or it's in a similar memory file.

[Paris Martineau]

Is that memory then? Or is it just reading a script every day and being like, ah, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean is that memory? What kind of question is that?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, it's not remembering.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not any memory. It has to look at its notes. Just like the guy in Memento, remember he was making all his post it notes. He'd wake up and says, you name is this. And this is. But they're much more detailed and much more elaborate. For instance, one of the things I did for that tool you saw that's doing the posts about shows is it had to have access to the Twit API. So I said go, here's where the Twit API is. Read that document. Create a document for yourself that you can understand that is the Twit API. So you won't forget it. So now it has a document. And I can say, you know, the API, it's here, here's. It's in effect creating a memory for it. That's. It's a little more manual than you and I, but really what is our

[Jeff Jarvis]

memory at Our age, Leo. You know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is our memory after I. Okay some funny stories. These are the. This is the ay yay section. AIs cannot stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations. This is why I hope the Department of Defense does not get access to anthropic. This is at King's College London. Kenneth Lane or Kenneth Payne took GPT5 2 Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash. You can see this is a few months ago. And had them play simulated war games involving intense international standoffs, border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival. The AIs were given an escalation ladder. This is from new scientists allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war. They played 21 games, 329 turns in total produced about 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind the decision. In 95% of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed. Payne says the nuclear taboo doesn't seem to be as powerful for machines as for humans. They very rarely surrendered no matter how badly they were losing. No model ever chose to fully accommodate an opponent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Dr. Strangelove was in the training set.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not good at diplomacy and if you've got nuclear weapons you might use them.

[Benito]

Like how many science fiction stories and movies and whatever have already said this Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Play games?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

More than half of teams use chatbots for schoolwork says the New York Times survey says from the Pew Research center

[Jeff Jarvis]

necessarily a bad thing.

[Leo Laporte]

54% students age 1317 said they used a chatbot for tests.

[Paris Martineau]

It is a bad thing because I feel like as we've talked before the reason the thing you're in school to do is not to finish assignments. It's to learn how to learn and you can't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

What if the world way you in the future the way you will learn is by using an AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah I don't think that's actually calculator in the classroom.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like before you get to teacher who said you shouldn't use the Internet for your assignment.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's not the present guys, before you use a calculator even you get to using a calculator as a child today you learn what numbers are. You learn what times tables are conceptually you need to have an understanding of the basic building blocks that then you can use the expedients that we've created in a. In a smart and logical way and understand the underlying thing there. People should learn fundamentals before you get to learn, you need to learn the rules before you can break them.

[Leo Laporte]

Did your mom and dad make you learn the times tables?

[Paris Martineau]

My school. I. I even grew up in Florida, and we. My school, school maybe learn time tables.

[Jeff Atwood]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

When I was a kid, like, 49th in the nation. When I was a kid, my dad made little laminated cards with the times tables and would.

[Paris Martineau]

My parents. My mom printed them out, put them on a wall. We had to stand in front of them for hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, see, they did make you do that. I regret. It's one of my deepest regrets that I didn't do that to my daughter.

[Paris Martineau]

She's mad at me.

[Leo Laporte]

She says I can't do the times tables. I never had to memorize them. I said, I should have made you like my parents did. And like Paris's parents, being the good parents that they are, did truly.

[Paris Martineau]

So many. I mean, I doubt any kids are at this hour in this podcast, but so many theory. Every time I'm like, oh, there's some dumb thing from high school or middle school that I'll never learn, I end up encountering. And I'm like, yep. Glad I knew that, because I needed to know how to look up this or do this. Like, it all comes back in some stupid.

[Jeff Atwood]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought, oh, Abby will never have to do this because she'll use a calculator. But it turns out there's plenty of times you want to do math at least.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How do you do tips, dad tips?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What's 20% of you know? $15.32. What's the point of school? Matthew G. Writes at 404. What's the point of school when AI can do your homework? This is a new product, an AI agent called Einstein that wants to free kids from the burden of academic labor.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, there is a movement to get rid of homework.

[Benito]

Yeah, screw homework. Why is homework even a thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is an old movement, the flip the school movement, Right. Where you go to school to be mentored, to be taught. And the way we did it was you go to school to be taught, and then you go home to do the homework. The flip to school is you do the homework at school, and then you go home and you watch a lecture on YouTube or something. I don't know. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. Anyway, neither one sounds that good. If AI can go to school for you, what's the point of going to school for Advait Paliwal Brown dropout and co creator of Einstein? There isn't one. I think about horses. He said they used to pull carriages. But when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free. They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and say, no, I want to pull carriages. This is my purpose in life.

[Benito]

Horses would be extinct.

[Paris Martineau]

Horses.

[Benito]

Sorry. They would be extinct if they weren't used.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

Factory owners have some words to say.

[Leo Laporte]

It is so bad. Anyway, I don't. You know, I don't know if schools are using it.

[Benito]

He just didn't get all the way there. He. He got to the point where how we're taking teaching kids right now is wrong. But he didn't make the extra leap of like, we need to change that.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe we should teach them right instead of saying, don't teach them at all. I think we really need to question what learning is and whether traditional education institutions are actually helping or harming us. Okay, we'd agree with that. Right. We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI. And that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. Oh, you gotta earn a living. You'll be able to earn a better living if you have an education.

[Benito]

He's arguing against capitalism. Right there is what he's doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Maybe that's it. We should. That's the UBI argument. Right? Universe. So, basic income. Hey, you probably know about this, Paris. AI manages 16 of America's apartments.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know what that means? That means rent's going up. But this has been a problem for a while.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It manages it or somebody uses it.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, no, I mean, this is the same sort of I believe it's real page. I'm forgetting the name. The company that ProPublica did that on.

[Benito]

Yes. The dynamic.

[Paris Martineau]

Essentially, they. It's dynamic pricing for apartments.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paris Martineau]

It's. Instead of having a landlord or some sort of human or a super or a management company employee being like, well, yeah, this tenant has been here for five or six years. Our expenses haven't really increased. I guess we don't really need to increase their rent. Or if we do, it can only be 2%. There's some system out there that's calculating what is the highest we can raise this rent and the person will likely even stay.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of this article from the San Francisco Gate is saying they're using AI for kind of customer service, responding to emails, things like that. I don't have a problem with that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

As long as it has the authority to actually fix the problem.

[Paris Martineau]

You're not. No one is Reaching out to customer service of your apartment building. No one's reaching out to someone in an apartment building for something that can be handled by an AI Chapter, San Francisco. You're reaching out because your pipe has burst or you need to renew some sort of lease complicated thing. You're not reaching out to a landlord or management company because you have an easy problem that can be handled in, like, one sentence, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe if it's just cause calling the super to come up and fix it.

[Paris Martineau]

But how can a chatbot do that? And why would it be better to pay an intermediary rather than just having that person be able to text?

[Leo Laporte]

Because the chatbot's instant.

[Paris Martineau]

But the super is not instant.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you're stuck with a bad super. You're stuck in a bad super.

[Paris Martineau]

No, but you're. What is also instant is sending the message to the super. In this case, there's no reason from an intermediary level.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You need Schneider for One Day at a Time.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew he was gonna go there. I just knew you were gonna go there.

[Paris Martineau]

Who is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't ask.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You didn't watch One Day at a Time.

[Leo Laporte]

We've done this whole thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought that was to be in your time.

[Leo Laporte]

Guy with the keychain that goes like this. You. You don't remember that? I think we did this a couple of years ago with you. Pat Harrington Jr. You have no memory like Claude. Oh, I need to write a markdown file that explains all this.

[Paris Martineau]

I want this outfit.

[Benito]

Okay, so, like, we need a new.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think we did this?

[Paris Martineau]

Because I think I made. I have no recollection of this, but this reminds me of me. A game you might have played where it's a. It's a reference to some old thing where it's like someone knocks in the front on the door.

[Leo Laporte]

Come and knock on my door.

[Paris Martineau]

It's like, it's the plumber. I've come to fix the sink. And it's just repeating that over and over.

[Benito]

A new task for the chat room. Let's try to figure out from the transcripts what all the old stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

The super, he actually was the best character in One Day at a Time. He was hysterical.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Valerie Bertinelli.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. When she was. It was a good show. So he was the super who had actually fixed things, and he had a lot of character. Anyway, enough of that. I did not know this, but it has been illegal in San Francisco since 2024 to use AI tools to set and raise rental prices.

[Benito]

That was from that story, that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Benito]

That was from before when.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, RealPage, which is that software has reached a formal settlement with the Department of Justice to curb those practices earlier this year.

[Paris Martineau]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

But this was a big problem. We actually, I think, talked about this a year or so ago. These automated AI rent raisin machines now. Steve Gibson talked about this yesterday. Do not use your ChatGPT to create a password. You wouldn't do that. This is a public service announcement. It looks like a good password. It isn't. It is not. In fact, there's a good chance that the password that the LMM has given you is going to be the same as it gives 20 other people. If you want a password, you know, use a password manager or go to Steve's perfect password page. He will generate using, you know, entropy to randomize it, a good password. Do not get your password from an AI. But I could see a lot of people, this is the, this is the issue, is it. People say, oh, it's a smart thing. It's going to give me a good password. It's a smart thing that could do some things really, really well and some things not well. And that would be one that it doesn't do well. On the other hand, it's very good at hacking. A hacker used Claude to steal a Mexican data trove. According to Bloomberg, hacker exploited Anthropics PBC artificial intelligence chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information. The hacker didn't know Spanish, so he had Claude write span. Wait a minute. The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish language prompts. I'm sorry. For the chatbot to act as an elite hacker. So he did know Spanish and in fact used Spanish to talk to Claude. That's good. This is becoming more and more common, these vulnerabilities being exploited by AI. Do you want to do a couple of weird things and then wrap it up? I. I sense fatigue on the other end of the microphones here.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, it is 8pm I feel, I fear the east coast wing is getting sleepy.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, in watching us on Kick. Hello, Africa dancers. I'm live from Africa. Come show me some love. It would make my day.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, people on Kicks tell Clavicular we say bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, click.

[Leo Laporte]

Uber employees have made an AI clone of Dara Koshwajari, their CEO. They use Dara AI to have a conversation before they talk to the boss in person.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

Men yell at AI 80% more than women. Of course we do, actually, because we're company doesn't know. My wife routinely yells at Siri, by the way. Siri gets mighty affronted if you swear at her. She says it's not a nice thing to say.

[Paris Martineau]

Kids, that's rough.

[Leo Laporte]

This AI powered machine turns photos into smells. It's called the Anamoya device. If you can picture a memory from childhood, feed it to the AI. This is developed at MIT and it will use a model to analyze an archival photo, describe it in a short sentence and following the user's own inputs convert that description into a unique fragrance which will then.

[Paris Martineau]

I feel like people keep telling me that we can get smells from the Internet and it keeps not happening. So I'll believe it when I smell it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's the machine, our flying car.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at this. This is a machine. You put your picture of going to the beach, put a little prompt in, press a button. It's gonna make a little perf. It's a little beach smell. And your brain goes, I'm there. The Anamoya device

[Jeff Jarvis]

that's like that thing that squeezed the juice.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it can go in both directions because this is the Fitbit for farts. A scientist developed a new underwear bubble to do for this is the Wall Street Journal.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you and Jeff both independently put for farts in the rundown Y Great

[Jeff Jarvis]

minds, you know mature, mature old men can never.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to wear it in your underpants and it will. It. It will analyze your flatus. They give you the flatosomics dashboard camera.

[Paris Martineau]

Toilet is rough.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One of my proudest moments in writing criticism was when I said of Howard Stern. He's more than the second some of his farts.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

He had a character which you won't remember I hope Paris called Fartman.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That wore chapless butts. Or is it buttless chaps? I think it's the other way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

On the. On the. On the Video Music Awards there is

[Leo Laporte]

a department at the University of Maryland. They're doing the Flatus atlas and they even have. It looks like a seal that says Prodigious Hydrogen producer.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm laughing at the quote below that which says farts have an illegal amount of hydrogen. About 20%. And I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that makes it flammable. Anyway, we don't have to go any any further down this road. I just thought it paired up nicely with the smell generating machines. And then finally. This actually is a great story. This is worthy of Jeff Atwood. I taught my dog to vibe code games. This is from Caleb Leak and it is A blog post, and the dog doesn't really know what it's doing, but they gave the dog a keyboard, and there's a Raspberry PI that interprets the dog's nonsense. Keystrokes.

[Paris Martineau]

That's beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So there was a period in my coffee brewing process where I was like, God, my keyboard's broken. This is terrible for. I was like, on my laptop, on the computer, I was like, this is terrible for my vibe coding. But I didn't realize I've got this external keyboard over here and Gizmo was sitting on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

It wasn't broken.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, what if Gizmo could create video games with the help of Claude? Here are some of the games. It's a competitive salad building game.

[Paris Martineau]

That dog doesn't know what salad is.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. So what the guy did basically is told Claude, this isn't gibberish, this stuff that you're getting. It is actually a brilliant but weird coder. Here's the prompt. Hello. I am an eccentric video game designer, a very creative one who communicates in an unusual way. Sometimes I'll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like SKFJHH number sign $sign, percent but these are not random. They're secret, cryptic commands full of genius game ideas. Even if it's hard to see your job. You AI are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation. And it got the AI to do it.

[Paris Martineau]

So Claude was just cook. Cooking on its own.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Without any real, real input.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It was like giving, giving it random numbers. He, he, he gave. Here's his doggie. He gave his doggy a little. See, I think Gizmo wants to do this.

[Paris Martineau]

I know she heard you talking about. Yeah, animals that can code and was like, I must get in on this.

[Leo Laporte]

And in order to get the dog to do the typing, he would reward her. He had a little dog feeder that would be triggered by the keyboard, so at least she would get a little.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There it is. There it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Katanis has arrived. It's in the house. All right. That is it. That is all I have. I hesitate to do this, but since it is on your dime, are there any stories you had that I did not cover?

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's one I'd like to mention because I think it's so cool, which is line, not going to find it. It's the Video. Yeah. Play without.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. John K creates a AI video with Sea Dance. This is that new Sea Dance 2.0 model. He's a well known Chinese filmmaker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So just, just to play the video. I'm sorry for you folks who are listening, but it's pretty amazing. So he used CDNs to create a video of a vision of himself as real, but then an. An AI made up version of himself. And then he has a dialogue with himself about creativity.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, this is fine because they're the. It's in Chinese.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's in Chinese. But I don't want you to take it down with the music.

[Leo Laporte]

I won't play it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So here's the version that'll end up there.

[Leo Laporte]

The real guy going up to the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, this is not the real guy. This is the AI version of the real guy.

[Leo Laporte]

So none of this is real.

[Jeff Jarvis]

None of this is real. So that's the AI version of the real guy. And then that's AI's imagination of the

[Leo Laporte]

real guy who is 10 pounds lighter.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Lighter. And he says, I want the 10 pounds back. I think it's better. And it's subtle in some ways. The, the, the, the AI AI guy is a little too happy, a little too sycophantic, a little too smiley. The AI version of the real guy isn't like that.

[Leo Laporte]

This is smart because it is all in fact AI, but it avoids the uncanny valley a little bit because he makes the AI version of himself seem kind of less AIY than the other one. Right.

[Benito]

It's also in conversation with the technology itself. Right. Like it is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Benito]

This is an art piece.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's about creativity. It's really something. Whereas in the US it's, oh my God, they used it for two seconds to have Brad Pitt.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's usually fighting, it's usually combat explosions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is brilliant.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just watch the version where you can get the translated subtitles, but I think it's an amazing bit of creativity and art. I talked to the AI and creativity course that I wrote the syllabus for, which I'm not teaching, but somebody else is last week. And I just sent this to the professor who's doing it because I think it's a great example of how to use it.

[Benito]

And I think I read somewhere, I'm not sure if I'm wrong about this, but I think he wrote his own lines for like he actually wrote the lines for his main character and then he had the AI write the lines for the AI character.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's what I think happened. Yeah. And Then Leo, I want to mention just to. Just to piss you off because, because I've been doing that all day, so I might as well with it, please.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I've been pissing off people.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know that we get mad at each other. We never get mad at each other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Barry Weiss.

[Leo Laporte]

Great conversation. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Barry Weiss allegedly tried hard to hire Joanna Stern with a seven figure offer for cbs.

[Paris Martineau]

And she said look of pure rage on Leo's face in that microsecond. Someone needs to go back and isolate

[Leo Laporte]

because that was, I wish the best. Joanna was a regular on our shows for a long time until she became too famous to be on our shows anymore. At the Wall Street Journal. She's left the Wall Street Journal. I could make a comment that would be rude and I'm, I'm not going to make that comment. But. And she turned it down. Seven figures is in the millions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the story here is that I don't believe Harry Weiss is desperately trying to hire people. This is Oliver Darcy's status blog and it was reported, rumored. Whatever. But she's been trying to hire lots of people and she can't because she's.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody wants to work for a corrupt cbs. No, I can see that Joanna would not say yes to that.

[Jeff Atwood]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

But although that would be hard if somebody. I'll be honest, Barry, give me a call. We'll talk. I don't know what I could do for you, but I can report on technology. If that's what you wanted Joanna to do. I mean, not as good on camera.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Would do a better job than Tony decopal.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. I could do. I could anchor the nightly news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So I don't want to get that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is. That is the story that got my dander.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it is. I don't. It's late, so I don't want to get into the Wired controversy, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's funny that you put that right underneath the Barry Weiss offer to Joanna Stern. There's a little, there's a little resonance between the two. There is, but see, I don't see. I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there. I don't actually believe a. That Barry Weiss made that offer that much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Would you believe that she went after her.

[Leo Laporte]

She tried to recruit her TV pays really well. Well, yeah, yeah. Seven figures is not that much.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. It could have been a multi year and somebody, you know, but they pay. They pay Rachel Maddow $35 million to work one day a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a lot of money in this stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There is.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they make. Tend to make a lot of money. Ladies and gentlemen, we want to thank you for watching the show. We really especially want to thank our club Twit members who make it all possible and encourage you, if you're not a member, to join the club. Makes a huge difference to keeping this show on the air. The AI user group, which is a week from Friday. A week. No, two weeks from Friday. The Stacy's Book Club. Johnny Jett's coming up tomorrow to talk about travel. All of that's made possible by the club. You get access to the Discord and you get ad free versions of all the shows. If you want to know more. Twitt, TV Club, Twit. And you will get my eternal thanks in addition to all those other benefits.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right, thanks too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Picks of the week. Actually, I'll start. I'll start. I have. I have a lot of picks these days. I don't know. Why do you want to know about the camera? The app that lets you know when meta cameras are nearby, called the Paranoia app. Well, it turns out this distinctive Bluetooth signature that these meta smart glasses give off. And so it is possible for you to run some software. It's called Nearby glasses. It's on GitHub, it's open source. You can install it on your Android phone and it will let you know that somebody's nearby. They'll see the Bluetooth signal and somebody's nearby. They do say it is illegal to harass somebody because they're wearing glasses. In fact, it may even be a more serious offense than wearing the glasses. Please seek legal advice regarding your local laws on this matter. So don't use this to harass people wearing meta glasses, but maybe if you cared about your privacy, this would be something you'd want to do. And then I don't know why this appealed to me, but it really did. This is a website called Signatory that lets you. First of all, it has some famous signatory app. It's free, has some famous signatures you can look at. It has advice about what your signature, how you would create your own signature. Did you do that in school? I did.

[Paris Martineau]

Where you practice your signature at a Red Robin with my mom.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really? She said you need to have a signature.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for your mom. So once you've got this, go to this website signatory app and you can draw your signature. And I wouldn't do it with a mouse. Do it on your phone. But it's using software that detects speed and stroke. So it actually looks like you're using ink.

[Jeff Jarvis]

My rule is if you can't read it, it's my signature.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I did this on my iPad. Got a very nice signature. And then you can save it, which is great as either a PNG or a vector graphic, which is even better. I saved it as both. I did my initials. I did my signature. This is a legal signature that you could put on documents. It's very handy to have. I just.

[Paris Martineau]

It's really hard to do on a trackpad.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't. Yeah, you gotta. You gotta do it on a. Do it on your iPhone. It'll be fine. You can turn it sideways. Signatory app Paris, what's your thing?

[Paris Martineau]

I've got.

[Leo Laporte]

You got the camera.

[Paris Martineau]

I got a camera and I got it just in time for the blizzard.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at these. Oh, that's gorgeous.

[Paris Martineau]

I like that one. And then one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that's nice.

[Paris Martineau]

And then I posted some other ones that were a follow up to this post as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paris Martineau]

We're just walking around, but I've really enjoyed it. It's a Fujifilm. It's just the entry level. It's XT30.

[Leo Laporte]

Good choice.

[Paris Martineau]

3.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it fun, though, to have a pocket, a good pocket camera as opposed to a phone?

[Paris Martineau]

So nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. That's beautiful.

[Paris Martineau]

So much better than my phone. And I'm just using, like, the kit lens, albeit it's a new kit lens, but I want to get a new one, so I don't know. I'm really enjoying the photography. I'm like, figuring out how to.

[Leo Laporte]

That's another show.

[Paris Martineau]

You should join us and stuff like that.

[Jeff Atwood]

I should.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a photo show every month, too.

[Paris Martineau]

It's been really delightful and I've enjoyed it.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Photography's a wonderful thing. And you live somewhere where there's really lots of things to take pictures of.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, there are so many things. I. Whenever I got it, I went to go see a show at IFC with a friend, and then afterwards, just walking around the East Village taking photos at night. And it was fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paris Martineau]

Just a true delight. My other pick, which I'm cannibalizing of what could be used as a future pick, but I really can't get off mine is. I'm addicted to the New York Times Crossplay app. Have you guys gotten on this?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's so funny. I just read a story that said,

[Paris Martineau]

basically just words with friends, but it's New York Times and it's slightly Different. And it's. I am playing maybe 10 people on crossplay right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you play real people?

[Paris Martineau]

You. It's a two person game where you can either play your friends or match with random strangers based on your experience and skill level. And I am, I'm trouncing the competition.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not like wordle on a webpage. You have to have the app on your phone.

[Paris Martineau]

You have to have the Crossplay app on your phone. It's a different times game. Play it in your game.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to give out your handle?

[Paris Martineau]

No, but I'll give you to my handle and text after this. And then you can play Crosswords with Friends.

[Leo Laporte]

I like. I used to play Words with Friends until it got so commercial.

[Paris Martineau]

I've been. I don't know. And it's great. So the thing is, it's slightly different than your normal Scrabble board or normal Words with Friends. The range of where the various different tiles is slightly different, which makes it fun in my opinion. And they have slightly different rules. It's still using like NWL 2023. As far as the word list. If you're a crossword head.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny, this is what's really saved the New York Times. Not journalism.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it has? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a newspaper.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's me battling a man named Ira who I don't know what his deal is.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably Ira Glass, though. He's this American life.

[Paris Martineau]

It's probably possible. And he's not as good as you'd expect, but also not as bad as

[Jeff Jarvis]

some of the other guy named Ira. You think Ira would be the late Lex?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Jeff Jarvis. His books are of course

[Paris Martineau]

the man Pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Okay. What's your pick?

[Jeff Atwood]

I'm sorry, Log this. Log.

[Leo Laporte]

I forgot my picks. I forgot you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jesus. I did piss him off. Oh, God. I want to mention first, very quickly I was, I was doing my, my mall walking to try to get my strength back and I wandered into the Apple store, honest to God looking whether I should get a new Mac Mini so I can do the crap that you're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no. You don't need a Mac Mini.

[Jeff Jarvis]

All right. And, but anyway, a woman came up to me and said, are you Jeff Jarvis? Oh, and a fan, which hasn't happened in a long time as well. A wonderful woman named Chantal Maurice. We now follow each other on LinkedIn. Wonderful thing to happen. And she just got, that day was her last day, laid off with people at Verizon. So I want to mention it for her because she's exploring opportunities in media and entertainment tech around content platforms, AI driven initiatives and give her a look up on LinkedIn. And it's obvious that also I need friends because when I went to Facebook and just by happen stance I clicked on it's recommended friends to me. If you would go to line two.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh my God, it's all AI and AI slots.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I have slopped people. It's entirely every. Every supposed friend recommendation here.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my goodness.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Slop people.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think those are real people with sloppy photos or those are.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh no, there's all like Reginald Davis is. Is a very attractive woman.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin Rodriguez too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And Benjamin seems to be some sort of trash panda and Nathaniel is a cat with a ball which everyone knows.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Alan and Robert and Wayne are all the same person so it's very confusing. So anyway, I just wanted to mention that my friends, the one I wanted to show you earlier and I'm going to show you now is line 207. Fascinating. How far back in time can you understand?

[Leo Laporte]

So funny. You know what? I almost bookmarked this and I thought

[Jeff Jarvis]

no, I. I loved it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a blog post that goes back in time via the post somewhere around

[Jeff Jarvis]

Beowulf era, you know, so 2000 it has some language. You go back to 1900 and it changes a little bit.

[Paris Martineau]

At some point it gets to Yarby

[Jeff Jarvis]

Garble 1800, then 1700. It uses the. The sharp, the long S. Ah, so that looks like I was fifth when it was first.

[Leo Laporte]

When I was first come to Wolfleet I did not see the harbor for I was weary that night. I was untroubled by such. Have you ever tried to read Chaucer in the original?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's where we are. There's another post this same author did. We should give credit Colin Gorey about how print, you know, froze dry freeze dried the language.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, thank goodness.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And such because spelling was not at all consistent.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By any means. And explain he explains in that post how some of the words that have two e because there were. There were two different pronunciations of e. One was a long E and a shorty basically. And so words like beat have two e's in them because it was a one e with a long e. It's pronounced that way. I love this stuff. I just love this stuff. So go to dead languagesociety.com folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like a great stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, it is. It is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice. I've been lately adding quite a few personal blogs to my beat check because I just. Some of this stuff. Some people. People are doing such great stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Your OPML was filled with amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Coggy has a wonderful small blog search index for people who, you know, just do, you know, little personal blogs. There's some really good stuff out there. I'm glad to see it. I thought blogging might be gone.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's still plenty of corners of the Internet where you can read great personal writing. You can read great personal writing in Jeff's books. The Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine is new on Hotspot magazine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't reach down to get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and he can't. And I can't get up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got a grabber. And grabbers come in twos, because when you drop your grabber, you need a grabber to.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no. That's their excuse, I guess. So you have to buy two.

[Paris Martineau]

I'll grab her.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a grabber.

[Paris Martineau]

Grabber in a single pack.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But that's why. That's where I am now.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have a grabber, too, Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

I do. It's probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that because you have stuff so high?

[Paris Martineau]

If I had a grabber for my grabber, I would be able to grab it right now.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we have a grabber here, too. I. Is there. Is there a universality of grabbers?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I only got it because I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand why you have one. Yeah. Oh, by the way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's. That's mean.

[Paris Martineau]

One.

[Jeff Atwood]

Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

I have it because a lot of lots. Sometimes my packages get delivered below our stoop, which is a metal grate that I don't have the key to. And so I have to, like, use a long pole to get the package close to me and kind of lift it up by shoving my hands in between little middle grates.

[Leo Laporte]

Sometimes I want to deliver a package to you and stand across the street and film your attempt to.

[Paris Martineau]

There's been multiple times where I. Because I also want to have my headphones and listen to podcasts because it's a complicated process. I'll be there. And there's, like, a mailbox in the thing. So I was over there trying to get it up. I finally got it, and then I noticed someone was watching me, and I lifted my head up, smacked my head on the mailbox, hurt myself. Was listening to a podcast, felt like I was bleeding. And then a whole construction team was like, excuse me, ma', am, are you the property owner? We need to do some construction here. I was like, no, please leave me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Everybody's trying to arrest you for this. Thinking you're stealing things.

[Benito]

I'm just a porch pirate.

[Paris Martineau]

No, that would be great because I had my first ever package stolen mid blizzard. I thought that'd be fine, but I had a. The only package and God knows how many years I've lived here has been stolen in the middle of when we got two feet of snow. It's not buried under a snow pile.

[Leo Laporte]

The dark of night will keep these porch pilots from their appointed rounds. God, this is what I love about New York City. You could do any kind of weird behavior in public and people just walk by. Whatever. You know, this is New York. She's obviously got same scooper.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm out there sawing the liberal laws.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, exactly. I don't know why that lady's cutting the tree down, but hey, she must be. She must work for the city.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Paris Martineau. She actually works for Consumer Reports where she is a wonderful. I see we got the wrong lower third. She's a wonderful consumer investigative reporter and grabber getter.

[Paris Martineau]

It's true.

[Leo Laporte]

You've had that so long. You, you, you still have the price tag.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, listen, it didn't come, it didn't come with a, a grabber tagger remover, did it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Did you, did you see, I was wondering, before Amazon, where would you go to buy a Grabber?

[Paris Martineau]

I got this in my local hardware store.

[Leo Laporte]

You did?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, for years, I think. Still there's some people there who know me by name because they're like, oh, you're that woman who buys all the paint and wood. And I'm like, yeah, there's nothing like,

[Leo Laporte]

like New York City. You've got corner hardware stores, you got corner bodegas. It's everything there. I love it. It. And you got three feet of snow and more coming. I hear. My sister says she's got more coming.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There was.

[Paris Martineau]

I was supposed to go to the gym this morning and I woke up at 6am and there was snow coming down. And I was like, well, I can't be walking 20 minutes through this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We had an inch and my wife said. My wife asked me, should we get the guy back to plow the. The driveway? And I said, yes. And she said, no, it'll melt. And she was right. It melted.

[Jeff Atwood]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's going to be like 40 degrees or something.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the worst.

[Paris Martineau]

Rejoice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess it's good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We have, we have such mountains trying to get out of our garage. Yeah. From the. I have to go a couple times. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a real Nightmare out there. I'm gonna try and find a photo of the boat before we leave. I'm gonna try. And one of the things I also took a photo of on my.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so glad you got that camera. That's just.

[Paris Martineau]

There is a bodega cat named Kiwi.

[Leo Laporte]

Kiwi the cat.

[Paris Martineau]

Kiwi the cat. And he was licking cabbages,

[Leo Laporte]

which is

[Jeff Jarvis]

legal in New York because it is

[Paris Martineau]

legal because it all goes. It all goes out in the wash. That cat's licking the cabbages. But it's not. Rats are not eating the cabbage. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably getting rid of the soot, I think, is the thing.

[Paris Martineau]

It is. It's doing some sort of.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, that looks like a particularly sooty cabbage. So. So, you know, Kiwi is licking our lips. What is that? Is that just like a carrot? Random carrot sitting down there in the cabinet.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, another thing over there, the carrots. The carrots up were up there. They've fallen from down below.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. It's so great for me from a distance to watch you guys back there, back east living your lives.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Living the life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We do this show, this wonderful show, Intelligent Mach machines. Every Wednesday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. Watch it on Twitch, tick tock X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Kick. But not Tick Tock. I lied. It's also on Discord. If you are in the club, so get in the club after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at Twitter TV IM. They're also on YouTube. There's video on YouTube. And of course, the best way to get it, subscribe to either audio or video or both. Both in your favorite podcast client. Apologies to people who listen to MacBreak weekly. There was one of our providers was down for like 15 hours and it confused Apple podcasts so much that Apple said, no, you have to pay for this show. That is not the case. Our shows are free. You can pay for it. We love it if you pay for it. But you don't have to. So if you had trouble getting Mac Break Weekly yesterday, check again. It's fine. We fixed it. And if you're ever, you know, told by one of these predatory and shittifying mega corporations, you have to pay for this show. You tell them, no, Leo says it's free. Free, free, free. Thanks for subscribing. For those of you who do, thanks for listening. For all of you. We appreciate it. We'll see you next time. I won't be here next time. I should mention Jason Hiner will be

[Paris Martineau]

hosting they're putting them in the old folks home. Finally, finally.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to Florida.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep, yep. Can't wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

One thing Fort Myers has a. Has a little boat with my name on it. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Hey there. It's Leo Laporte, host of so many shows on the Twit network, thinking about advertising. In 2027, we host a network of the most trusted shows in tech, each featuring authentic post read ads delivered by Micah Sargent, my co host and of course me. Our listeners don't just hear our ads. They really believe in them. Because we've established a relationship with them. They trust us. According to Twit fans, they've purchased several items advertised on the Twit network because they trust our team's execution expertise in the latest technology. If Twit supports it, they know they can trust it. In fact, 88% of our audience has made a purchase because of a twit ad. Over 90% help make it and tech buying decisions at their companies. These are the people you want to talk to. Ask David Coover. He's the senior strategist at ThreatLocker. David said Twitch hosts are some of the most respected voices in technology and cybersecurity and their audience reflects that same level of expertise and engagement. It's the engagement that really makes a difference to us. With every campaign, you're going to get measurable results. You get presence on our show episode pages. In fact, we even have links right there in the RSS feed descriptions. Plus our team will support you every step of the way. So if you're ready to reach the most influential audience in tech, email us PartnerWIT TV or head to Twitter TV TV Advertise. I'm looking forward to telling our qualified audience about your great product.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not a human being, not into this animal scene. I'm an intelligent machine.